One day I'll play the original Zelda. I actually quite enjoyed Adventure of Link, so I'm not afraid of it being too "Old School"
One day I'll play the original Zelda. I actually quite enjoyed Adventure of Link, so I'm not afraid of it being too "Old School"
My son likes OG Zelda too!
Also we beat Catherine and we saw Dragon Quarter for cheap at a video game thingy we went to so we got it!
It pains me to say that I've never actually completed this. I've started it countless times and even completed many of the dungeons. I just found it really easy to get lost in... and not in a good way. I think I was a bit spoiled as my first Zelda was ALTTP where it was a lot easier to navigate around. I will complete this at some point though as it is the starting point for a truly incredible gaming franchise.
Zelda was my first game. It was the game that got me into gaming. My dad brought an NES home when I was five, with Zelda. I would watch my dad play the game when he came home from work until he beat it. Then, I began to play it. I beat it when I was five. Not like a my dad helped me fight the bosses or find the dungeons, I legitimately played through the game myself. I could still pop the game in and beat it in an afternoon with no need for any kind of guide. Twenty years ago, when I was in my prime, I could do it in an hour. Its been about three years since I've last played through it, but that original Zelda cartridge is still the one I have, and the battery is still going strong.
That's a good boy.Quote:
Originally Posted by Pumpkin
Legend of Zelda has got to be the inflation-adjusted best game of all time. It is so far beyond what was available at that time and is still pretty great even today.
Hmm, well, if you don't count the games that came before it (like the first 4 Ultima games) because they weren't on a popular console, that's probably true.Quote:
Originally Posted by Del Murder
48.Okay, so moving past a classic, we're back to giant robots, and after another one coming up soonish, you won't have to listen to me talk about giant robots beyond an occasional Metal Gear for quite a while. MechCommander is also the only RTS on this list, so I'm sorry if that is one of your favorite genres, and this will also be my second to last PC exclusive title on the list since this is technically the last PC game I was really into until maybe a few years ago when I started taking advantage of Steam.If you actually bothered to read my entry on BattleTech (#76) on this list, you have a basic rundown of the early franchise. Remember when I mentioned that the former commander of the Star League basically gave the warring houses the middle finger and then left the galaxy to make his own Star League with hookers, gambling, and booze? Well ended up instead creating a new society of soldiers built around competition and an extreme honor system. While the group fractured into various clans, they are all honor-bound to that commander's dream of returning to the Inner Sphere and recreating the old Star League, by basically wiping out the various Houses and conquering all of it. Guess who showed up after the fourth succession war? To make matters worse for the Inner Sphere, the Clans not only still retain the knowledge of the technology from the Star League days, they've actually improved it. So when the Clans initially show up, they pretty much tear the Inner Sphere a new one and conquered large swaths of territory. Ignoring the large amount of politics and historical battles that take place, the Clan failed to succeed in their goals. They failed to take back Terra where the manipulative ComStar controlled the Inner Sphere behind the scenes, but their frightening battle prowess and major victories were enough to actually force the various Houses of the Inner Sphere to forget their grudges and band together to form the Second Star League. Their first act was Operation BULLDOG, which was a major force built from various houses and mercenary groups to take back all the territory the Smoke Jaguars Clan had taken during the Clan Invasion. This is the setting of MechCommander and specifically details the battle to take back the planet Port Arthur. You play the titular Mech Commander, in charge of a small force doing operations in the war effort to take back the planet. While you only start with four pilots and some pansy ass Light Mechs, you can eventually earn or salvage enough materials to build a powerful platoon of veteran fighters with mechs from both the Inner Sphere and the Clans. In addition to guiding the unit to complete the mission objectives, you're also in charge of using military funds to keep their battlemechs in top condition, change their payload, hire new pilots, and purchase new weapons and mechs to help make missions easier.The game is a mission base RTS with different objectives for your unit to complete that range from taking out enemy bases, assassinating a powerful enemy mech, escort missions, saving prisoners of war, or reconnaissance. The mission variety is quite nice and keeps you on your toes, often forcing you to think carefully about which pilots to send and what mechs to outfit them with. Many of the missions have secret objectives that can also be completed that usually nets you both new gear to outfit your unit with, and extra money for repairs and buying new mechs. Most pilots start out Green, except for two you are given in the early game. They move up in rank as they survive missions and can eventually become elites that can will make even the toughest missions manageable. They are ranked by their skills, which give you an idea of the type of mech they should be piloting. A pilot with great Sensor skills and little gunnery skills should probably not be piloting a combat focused Hunchback AC2, while a combat expert shouldn't be piloting a reconnaissance focused Raven or lightly armed Commando with a Jump Jet build. While I don't know if this was programmed into the game or not, the pilots have personalities you can read on their bios, but my friends and I have noticed that certain pilots seem to show off funny traits. For instance, I've always found the pilot Beast to have incredibly dumb luck. If he's not the only unit that walks away from a mission virtually unscathed, then he's usually the one with a sliver of health that somehow manages to survive it. He also tends to be the guy who lands the most critical hits, for some reason, which made him an excellent pilot for the Hollander and Hunchback. Lynx on the other hand, and this happened with all of my friends, is the guy who has a bad habit of wandering off from the group. I don't know why he does this, but he's the one who forced me to restart a mission when he discovered a Mad Cat in Mission 3 to both his and my own misfortune. Perhaps it's just our imagination, but it really does bring an interesting human element to the gameplay as you start giving your pilots imaginary traits or notice odd quirks with them. Speaking of the mecha, you have a whole variety of options in the game. You start off with two simple Commandos and a Firestarter, but can eventually acquire things like a Hunchback, Atlas, or Centurion through the shop. More mechs unlock as you successfully complete missions. You're even able to customize them by buying different variants with their own strengths and weaknesses like the speedy but incredibly fragile Jump Jet versions, the more combat focused Weapon variation, and the defensive and great for escort mission Armor variety. The real challenge is salvaging enemy mechs from missions. If you can defeat the enemy mech units without totally destroying them, it's possible to salvage them and add them to your arsenal. This is incredibly invaluable as it is usually the only means of acquiring Clan mechs and weapons, which as I stated above, are incredibly powerful compared to the Inner Sphere equivalents. Unfortunately, whether you can salvage a mech largely comes down to luck, and so you may find yourself replaying the same mission over and over to finally get that one unique mech you want.Speaking of which, this game can be quite challenging, in fact, it's one of the few games on this list I have never actually beaten due to getting stuck on a particularly nasty mission that appears late in the game. Part of this can sometimes be that your intel is bad or just poorly focused. For instance, the second mission only gives you an idea of what is around the mission objective points, it does not talk about what else is on the map which includes a really nasty Medium class Hollander Mech sporting a Clan version Gauss Rifle which will pick apart your light weight mechs like wet tissue paper. The third mission is more infamous for having a goddamn Timber Wolf (Mad Cat) wandering by its lonesome self on the bottom of the map, and even if you somehow salvaged that Hollander from mission 2, the Mad Cat can easily destroy it by itself. One of my favorite memories of this game, is actually setting up a trap for that Mad Cat and eventually beating and salvaging it, so the next dozen or so missions become utter cakewalks in comparison. This game was a real treat for me in middle school and high school, due to playing it along with two other mecha fan friends I had, so we would share stories of our exploits and share secrets. It was probably the last time I ever really did this with anyone outside a forum, so this game gives a warm nostalgia to me about those times. Also, despite what you see in the video intro, while it is possible for that unit configuration to win a fight against the Mad Cat, it pretty much requires the enemy pilot to be both dumb, and the heroes incredibly lucky cause that mech should have wiped the floor with that whole unit. Additionally, hooray for campy live action videos from Western Strategy games. I really need to give Command and Conquer a try someday.
Gee, methinks you like giant robots.
What can I say, I was a Transformers, Voltron, and Robotech fan as a kid. ;)Quote:
Originally Posted by Del Murder
I'm also not going to imply that I may have been late with this entry due to reacquainting myself with it over the weekend... :shifty:
After the next entry, you won't really have to listen to me fanboy about them as much.
47.
Armored Core is one of those sleeper franchises that's been around longer than people remember, and before a certain series with Souls in the title appeared, it was FROM Software's bread and butter franchise that kept the lights on in their studio. Armored Core is a franchise that largely laid down the ground work for the style of game design that later franchises would benefit from, in fact Hidetaki Miyazaki, the creator of the Souls franchise, actually got his start directing games from this franchise. Armored Core 2 was a PlayStation 2 launch title and a surprise hit for the company.
Armored Core is a franchise set in a bleak future where mankind nearly wiped themselves out due to an event known as the Great Destruction. Forced underground, mankind lost faith in their government and mega corporations slid in to fill the power vacuum in its stead. Now vying for power, the Mega Corps fight in both open and clandestine military operations of major corporate sabotage. Helping them in all this are Ravens, mercenaries organized under the merc company Raven's Nest which sell their services to anyone willing to pay. These soldiers pilot the series titular mecha, the Armored Core, to fight in missions and earn glory in the arena. In the PS1 trilogy (yes, technically AC2 is the fourth game in the franchise, AC numbering and generations can be confusing), it was discovered by several Ravens that the perpetual conflict between corporate interests, the ineffectiveness of the human government, and the forever proxy wars that humanity had been dealing with for a century was the work of an A.I. program that created and led the Raven's Nest. The A.I. was a survivor from the Great Destruction, tasked with keeping mankind safe and incapable of causing another Great Destruction, and in order to do so, created the modern cycle of conflict to keep mankind too occupied to cause real damage. This A.I. even created a physical avatar in the form of the mysterious No. 1 Raven of the nest known as Hustler One and his signature Red AC known as Nine Ball to keep society destabilized and stop other Ravens from uncovering the truth.
Of course, once the cat is out of the bag, the A.I. is dismantled, and his small army of Nine Balls are also defeated, awarding a new title to one Raven known as Nine Breaker, for defeating the legendary Raven. With the A.I. gone, mankind could finally reclaim their rule of the planet. AC2 picks up 67 years later. Earth is still recuperating from the Great Destruction, but a new hope lies in the discovery that certain pre-Destruction Mega Corps had started projects to terraform Mars that had kept going during the Great Destruction and Nine Ball's rule. Mankind begins to immigrate to the red planet, where they bring their old conflicts and new Mega Corps as well. You play as one such Raven who has come to Mars to find profit. Your first mission to prove you're skilled enough to work for Nerves Concord to work as Raven. Though the planet is controlled by the Earth based LLC organization, they are ineffectual in containing the conflict between Emeraude, Zio Matrix, and Balena, the three Mega Corps that call Mars home. As a Raven, you take jobs from all four factions as they fight for control of the planet and the knowledge behind the mysterious Disorder units, insect like robots that may be of alien origin but native to Mars. Eventually, the LLC brings in a Black OPS unit from Earth known as the Frighteners, led by the Ninebreaker Leos Klein, who may or may not be the main character from Master of Arena.
Armored Core is a mission-based mecha game where you play as a Raven and take on various jobs for any party willing to buy your services. These missions range from simple destroy enemy units, to scouting missions, rescue missions, bodyguard work, pest control of Disorder units, and even assassinations. Doing missions for the various corporations can earn their favor and they may reward you with special parts. Missions also don't stick around an you may lose jobs from competitors if you stick to one faction alone. Though completing all the missions for a specific faction does net you a rare part. Likewise, there are no do-overs, if you screw up in a mission, then you simply fail the mission and get charged for repairs and ammo costs. In fact, any damage or ammo used in missions will always be deducted from missions, so playing smart is always more ideal than going into a mission guns a blazing. Missions wind up being a balancing act of building efficient AC design with smart weapon load outs to minimize ammo and repair costs, while also making sure you stay neutral in your dealings with the various factions so you can keep getting work from all of them.
The Arena is the other gameplay mode, here, Ravens show off their skill and prowess through gladiatorial combat. You start at the bottom of the arena at Rank 50, but can work your way up, where you'll establish rivalries and earn prestige that is rewarded with extra parts and cash. The combatants also have fun bios about themselves and many sport some eccentric builds that open up your possibilities for your own designs. Even better, your costs for ammo and repairs are covered by the arena, so this is the best place to use as a test bed for your own builds. There are also several different types of arena's to fight from such as a cave with a low ceiling, an abandoned domed city, a crash site for a spaceship, and a few industrial complexes. Sometimes, beating an opponent can simply be a matter of fighting them in the right terrain. In an interesting point of story and gameplay integration, encountering and killing a Raven from the Arena during a mission will have them removed from the rankings. From there, new opponents will pop up in the lower ranking you can challenge.
Of course the main dish of the gameplay experience is in the Garage where you can customize your AC from the parts you buy and earn through missions. AC2 expands the level of customization from Master of Arena with new categories such as Radiators, Extensions, and Inside parts in addition to all of the regular options. The amount of parts and customization options can almost feel daunting, and while the sting ammo/repair costs from missions can hurt your budget, the game does throw you a bone in the fact that selling and buying parts is a 1:1 deal, so buying a part that ends up not working for your build can be resolved by simply selling it back and using the cash to buy something new. So you're not punished for having buyer's remorse, which is very nice. Some tidbits is that your design is less influenced by your Core and more by your Legs. Bipedal are jack of all trades with light and heavy options. Reverse Joint Legs offer better walking speed at the cost of lower defense and weight, quad legs are the fastest walking legs which allow for heavier weight loads, but sacrifices the ability to dash and instead have minor hovering ability. Tank legs offer the best defense and weight load at the cost of terrible speed and turning ability. Hover legs are new and offer more aerial options for your unit, but suffer from low defense, weight, and easy knock back. You can also paint your mech with a generous color option mechanic as well as give it its own emblem that you can design and save to give to other players. Additionally, the game allows you to keep multiple designs of your AC so you can build a few different models depending on what you need. My favorite part is in NG+ where the player has their weight limiter removed. Normally, building an AC whose weight is too much for their Core or Legs can't go into missions. But once the game is beaten, this limiter is removed and you now have full creative control of how to build your AC. The model on the game's cover for example, is impossible to build before this limiter is removed as both its legs and core are closer to lightweight models than heavy ones, but all its weaponry are incredibly heavy. The Karasawa Pulse Rifle it's carrying alone would cost most of its weight load.
The biggest drawback of AC2 is not it's high learning curve, of which save scumming or save states on an emulator can relieve you of those headaches, but rather the games awkward control setup. The PS1 entries had to make do with some wonky controls thanks to the OG PlayStation controller, which didn't have analog sticks. So the shoulder buttons were utilized for camera control of up and down, as well as strafing. Not great, but acceptable for its time. AC2, despite having a better controller to work with opted to keep the original control scheme. In fact , AC wouldn't give movement or camera control to the analog sticks until AC: Nexus, the technical eighth installment of the series. So playing for awhile is going to do a number on both your hands and your controller. On the other hand, AC2 does bring back the Human PLUS mechanic from the earlier games. So for players who are just really bad at the game and incur a debt of 50,000 credits will be treated to a special Game Over scene where the player character is forced to sell their body to science to get out of debt. This has the effect of starting your game completely over, but it eliminates your debt, allows you to keep any parts purchased before falling into debt, and you gain a special ability that makes the game easier. There are eight bonuses you can earn and they all stack too. In fact, most of the top ten ranked Arena opponents have these bonuses in addition to the overweight limiter removed. So failing the game can also make you more powerful.
Overall, AC2 is a fun romp of cyberpunk/mecha dystopia that makes me all warm and giddy inside. The game also gained an expansion packed sequel in the form of Another Age, which drops the Arena but offer 103 missions for the player to have fun with. To put this in perspective, the base game has maybe 32 missions, and AC2:AA has more missions than any other game in the franchise. You can import your data from this game to start it off with your endgame build. Beating this game also nets you some special missions where you can have rematches with the bosses from the PSX entries, but now in the graphical style of the PS2 generation. The duology also ends the timeline of the original AC series that started back in AC1 on the PSX. ACIII is a soft reboot with a plot that is largely a retelling of AC1. Yet oddly, elements from the original timeline keep poking back in. My only regret is that I didn't stick to the series more as I got older because the back half of the PS2 generation entries are super rare and expensive now, and don't get me started on the hard reboot entries that are AC4-ACV. Still, if you have the chance, I highly recommend this franchise.
Original Script I've always felt like the PS2 was a late bloomer. It was several years into it's lifespan before I finally felt the system actually had a good collection of games, and by the end, it probably has one of the best gaming library's of any console. The early years, not so much. Armored Core 2 was the only launch title I was remotely interested in, being a real sequel to the same series from the PS1. I also feel it may be the best entry.
Set in a Blade Runner inspired future where mankind ruined the earth and lives underground while mega corporations rule the planet like governments. AC2 slightly bucks the trend by changing the setting to Mars, where humanity is hoping to start anew after smurfing up their starter planet. Of course the Mega Corps follow, and so do their proxy wars, which are played out by Ravens, mercenary's that pilot the so-called Armored Cores for money, and have no real loyalty to anyone. The main plot is typical backstabbing corporate shenanigans, with a subplot about lost alien technology being found on the planet. Frankly, the differences in AC plots are in the details, but that's not why you play these games.
As a Raven, you start off with a cheap AC unit and have to prove your worth to the corporate masters and other Ravens by successfully completing missions and building your prestige in the AC Arena. The money you obtain can go towards outfitting your AC with better gear, and doing missions for the various CEOs will garner you special benefits like discounts on parts or access to exclusive weapons or missions. Likewise, many missions have powerful parts just hidden away for you to discover, like the infamous From Software weapon, the Moonlight Blade.
In a lot of ways, AC is sort of a Sci-Fi centric early predecessor to another famous From Software title, Dark Souls. Both games feature a more lore based story with minimal, but still impactful characters, challenging battles and gameplay that will hone your skills, and an incredibly deep customization system that gives you multiple ways to tackle the various game challenges and give plenty of replay value. It lacks DS' quirky multi-player, but makes up for it with the Arena, where you test your unit against specially designed AC units. Additionally, the real joy of the series is building your own custom mech.
Seriously the customization in this game is staggering, and it's more than just cosmetics and weapon load out, as you have to buy parts for radiators, engines, targeting systems, and much more which all offer unique changes and tweaks you can give your AC unit. My favorite part is that after beating the game and making a new completed save, you can restart the whole game with all the parts you bought in your old save, as well as the removal of the weight restriction which really opens up more customization options than before, and finally gives you a fair shot against the top Arena fighters who are all cheating bastards not held by the weight rule. Like, seriously, the unit on the cover is impossible to make in a normal play through. This is something the latter games kind of removed, sadly, or at least hid it behind more tedious challenges that I don't have time for.
AC2 is a mecha heads dream game that combines the deep gameplay elements of something like Dark Souls with the insane customization options of a Gran Turismo title, and I absolutely love it. There were even a few gaming mags back in the day that would hold contests where fans submitted their own custom AC units, that I always found fun. With that, I'm done with giant robot games for a while. I have like one true robot game left on this list, and most of you probably know which one it is. We'll be going back to RPGs and classic games for a while after this.
46.
Okay, so this game does feature a giant robot as well, but let's face it, Metal Gear is rarely really about the title machine. :p For most Western fans, MG2 was either the ill-conceived Snake's Revenge or simply the Previous Mission Briefing found in the Extras for MGS1. It wasn't until the Director's Cut version of Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence that the West got an official release of this lost gem of a game. For those who don't know, the original Metal Gear did find it's way Stateside with a terrible NES port from the original MSX. The port completely scrambled the original games structure and removed and added things that make it both easier and more difficult than it needed to be. It's practically a different game and when Kojima finally saw the port, he quickly disowned it. Despite all that, it actually sold pretty well over here and so Konami asked for a new entry but gave it to a completely new team. Funny enough, Snake's Revenge is closer to the original MG1 than the actual port was. Kojima, didn't even know about it's existence until he had a conversation with one of the developers for it. He initially disliked it, but has apparently warmed up to it over time. Still, he was spurned on by the development team to make a proper sequel to Metal Gear, and in 1990, he did so on the fledgling MSX2.
Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake begins four years after the events of Metal Gear in the "distant future" of 1999. The relationship between the Cold War enemies are thawing, and for the first time since the Cold War started, it looked like the threat of nuclear war may come to an end. Unfortunately, not everything is so rosy. Mankind has over-indulged in their love of oil, and now all the reserves may soon dry up, leading the world into a major energy crisis. With alternative fuel sources still decades away, the world fell into a major economical crisis, until a Czech biologist named Dr. Kio Marv discovered a type of synthetic algae that can convert spent oil back into usable hydrocarbons at an inexpensive level which he called OILEX. The crisis seemed to be over before it really began until Dr. Marv was kidnapped on his way to a U.N. meeting. As the world government investigates his disappearance, they soon notice a connection to a small but dangerous nation called Zanzibar Land.
During the ensuing years between the Outer Heaven incident and the oil crisis, a small nation to the south of the U.S.S.R. declared it's independence from the mother land. With the help of mercenaries and PMC groups, the small nation was able to win its independence. Soon after, it used its forces to to attack nuclear facilities and stole enough resources to become a nuclear power, allowing it to survive without further retribution from the superpowers. With nuclear weapons, one of the most advanced armies in the world, and now the secret to OILEX; Zanzibar Land was in position for a serious shake up of the global power structure. Understanding the delicate situation, the U.S. tasked FOXHOUND to once again lead a covert infiltration mission in order to rescue Dr. Marv and thwart Zanzibar Land.
Colonel Campbell, the new CO of FOXHOUND calls out of early retirment, the Outer Heaven hero Solid Snake for the missions. He's supported through codec by Master Miller, the trainer for FOXHOUND; Jacobsen, a zoologist and foody; Kessler, a retired merc and specialist on the industry; and Holly, a journalist and undercover CIA agent who has also infiltrated the base and supports Snake. Starting Metal Gear tradition, the simple rescue mission quickly becomes more complicated as Snake's first opponent is a technologically advanced ninja who is revealed to be Kyle Schenider, the resistance member who helped Snake overthrow Outer Heaven. Snake learns that after he destroyed Metal Gear and defeated Big Boss, NATO forces indescriminately carpet bombed the region, killing both Outer Heaven and resistance members. Kyle himself nearly perished and was captured by the forces and experimented on until Big Boss arrived and saved him. Realizing Big Boss is both alive but also the leader of Zanzibar Land, Snake quickly learns that many of his allies from Outer Heaven have returned. Dr, Madnar had alos been kidnapped and brought there to create the new Metal Gear D, and Snake's friend Grey Fox was now Big Boss' second in command. Battling skilled mercenaries, meeting the undercover agent Gustava Heffner and discovering her connections to Grey Fox, the staggering amount of war orphans being protected within the facility, and several tricks and traps that Snake is only bale to overcome thanks to Holly, and Snake's mysterious "No. 1 Fan. Solid Snake tears through a pretty dramatic adventure that culimnates in a final bout with Big Boss himself.
MG2 is an interesting game to play through, on the one hand, it retains one foot in the past with several gameplay conventions and story beats from the original Metal Gear, on the other hand, it's easy to see the proto-development of the MGS franchise with this game. MG2 is more story driven and action packed than it's predecessors with the foundation of several Metal Gear gameplay conventions such as crawling, 2 step alert modes, Soliton Radar, and better use of hiding for stealth. The story introduces a much more varied and better defined cast and some of the series well known tendencies of subverting a "black and white" scenario are clearly here.
The boss battles are more varied and better defined in this entry. The bosses of MG1 felt like typical arcade fodder outside of Coward Duck and the actual Metal Gear defense system battle, but here the bosses all have more exciting nuanced gimmicks to play around with. Blackcollar Ninja can attack from angles and while keeping his distance, Running Man plays keep away as you have to beat him before the room full of nerve gas kills you, Ultravox/Four Horsemen ambush you in an elevator so you have to balance the inclosed space with taking them out quickly, Blaster Man traps you in a room with barriers while he lodges grenades at you from the ceiling, Predator/Jungle Evil hides in tall grass for the series first attempt at a sniper duel, and Night Fright is a completely invisible enemy you have to use sound to find. The gimmicks are more memorable and fun, but sadly most of the boss fights are fairly easy. In additon the game continues the inevitable clash with a Hind D that stuck around for the first three entries, and we get our first battle with Metal Gear which is probably one of the easiest fights in the game unless you care about your final score. The actual final boss fight with Big Boss himself is actually more puzzle than an actual fight as he chases you around the room while acquiring more Key Cards and items to make a makeshift flamethrower to deal with him.
Of course it's the puzzle aspects of the games that are always nice and MG2 is no slouch. MG2 shares a lot of elements with old school PC Adventure titles as the game makes heavy use of a manual to figure certain things out like Codec Frequencies, and a morse code cheat sheet. Sadly, the Western release lacks any of this and it's one of the most glaring flaws in this title as you'll definitely want to keep Google close to you for help on some of the game's more eclectic puzzles. The game also is filled with some pretty silly elements like Japanese "Singing Sand", using an owl to trick a guard it's night time, and dealing with the lethally poisonous Zanzibar Land Hamsters. There's also an item that plays the Zanzibar Land National Anthem that makes every enemy on the screen stop what they're doing and salute. On the flip side, there are some clever puzzles like the introduction of the Temperature PAL Key puzzle MGS1 fans will know well, the overall layout of the base is also better contructed than other Metal Gear titles which makes backtracking less of a chore, though I will say that MG2 introduced the annoying "boss can only be beaten with a specific weapon and now you have to stop all progress to backtrack all the way back to the weapon storage floor to get it" syndrome that plagued the next two installments. One issue it retained from the original MG1 was how Key Cards only opened their corresponding door, meaing you had to hold several cards and keep switching them to see which one would open the door. Thankfully, MG2 introduced Color Cards that did the effect of three levels of a card to help mitigate inventory searching but chances are you'll not figure out where these cards are until near the end of the game when it's almost pointless.
Easily the biggest change from MG1 here is the narrative as I demonstrated above. While it falls short of the convoluted and socially aware sequels, MG2's story is pretty powerful for a game of its time, easily rivaling RPGs. Here we really get to see the earliest elements of what would layer become trademarks of the franchise. Every one of Snake's former allies who return in this installment all betray him or are fought as enemies if not both, Holly and Gustava both have concepts that will be reused for Meryl in MGS1, and we watch as Snake deals with one green horn female agent who can't seem to stay out of trouble while also dealing with one the he quickly grows to respect before she winds meeting a fateful end. While most of the bosses are one note wonders, Snake's conversations with Kyle (Black Ninja/Blackcollar), Grey Fox, and Big Boss are the earliest examples of the gut-wrenching monologues that several memorable bosses will later use. The game also tries for a more cinematic approach compared to it's sequels with character portraits, more dialogue, and some interesting sequences that make the game try to be more epic than it's 8-bits could muster which is quite impressive.
As I've been hinting to for awhile now, and for those who remember the original version of this post will already know, MGS1 borrows heavily from MG2 in both concept and design. In fact in Japan where MG2 was known, many fans thought MGS1 was a remake of this entry. So it's really interesting to play this game with knowledge of MGS1 though I imagine for some people it will feel a bit dated. Still, it's obvious that this entry, combined with Kojima's future projects in the form of Snatcher and Policenauts would pave the way for one of the most important games of the 3D Era of gaming. Sadly, while it will never likely come to pass in any capacity I would be happy with, I was kind of hoping this entry and the original MG1 would have gotten the remake treatment by Kojima, especially since both of these entries suffer the most retcons out of any entry in the franchise. Alas, it will likely never happen.
Thanks to the re-release of MGS3: Subsistence on the Legacy Collection, it's not too hard to get this game nowadays legally. I strongly encourage Metal gear fans to check this one out as MG2 is really a lost gem in a franchise with a pretty strong track record. The music is good, the gameplay is basically 2D MGS1 (or Ghost Babel for those who played it) and it features several important moments that help bring context to the drama that will unfold in future installments.
Original Gushing
Okay, so this game does feature a giant robot as well, but let's face it, Metal Gear is rarely really about the title machine. :p Originally an MSX title, Metal Gear was properly released in the West with MGS3: Subsistence over ten years ago, along with a non-butchered version of the original Metal Gear. Metal Gear 2 owes it's existence to the comically bad Snake's Revenge, a side-scrolling action sequel to the original Metal Gear that Konami ordered up, but gave to a completely different development team. Kojima was not amused when he first learned about it, and in his usual OCD kind of way, he eventually was able to get the greenlight on making a proper sequel to Metal Gear based on his own input and design.
Set in the "future" of 1999, the world is gripped with an energy crisis as the world's supply of oil is getting dangerously low, and society is too lazy to want to switch over to alternative fuel sources. Luckily, a Czech scientist known as Kio Marv has engineered a new type of algea that can produce petroleum grade hydrocarbons called OILIX. It seemed the crisis would be over, until he is kidnapped by the small nations of Zanzibar Land that had won it's independence from the U.S.S.R. in 1997 during the Mercenary War.
FOXHOUND is called into action, now run by Colonel Campbell after the Outer Heaven scandal of 95. Campbell tracks down Solid Snake, the shell-shocked veteran agent who ended the Outer Heaven crisis and killed the legendary soldier Big Boss. Once again Snake has to infiltrate a major enemy base where he will reunite with old friends, now turned enemies, and discover he's simply just a pawn in a bigger government scheme.
For what is basically the equivalent of an 8-bit title, Metal Gear 2 is surprisingly robust and actually features a more intelligible plot and cast than the first game. Even more surprising is just how much the gameplay has been overhauled and refined. When it really comes down to it, MG2 is basically a 2D MGS1. I've often felt that the biggest success stories of the 2D to 3D transition games of the mid to late 90s usually came down to designers basically just copying and pasting their last 2D titles into 3D games, Final Fantasy VII, Ocarina of time, and MGS all share an uncomfortable amount of similarities to their predecessors in terms of themes and gameplay elements, but hey, it worked and better to see these series move on than watch them flounder into obscurity like Mega Man, Sonic, and Castlevania.
Metal Gear 2 and MGS1's relationship is way more apparent than the other examples though, perhaps Kojima took advantage of the fact he knew most non-Japanese gamers have probably never even knew about MG2 existing, but it's funny to note that their are so many similarities between this game and MGS1 that Japanese fans first speculated that MGS1 was just a remake of MG2. No seriously, both games have a cyborg ninja as an enemy who is a a victim of experimentation by shadowy government agencies and happened to use a former friend of Snake whom he thought had died in the previous games, both games have that obnoxious PAL Card puzzle where you have to heat it up and cool it down, and in both games it turns out to be a trick by the bad guys. Snake deals with an undercover female soldier who disguises herself as an enemy soldier, there is a boss battle that involves Snake fighting four heavily armed guards in a locked elevator, and he has to fight both a tank and a Hind D at some point. Both games have a sequence where Snake has to jump down from one tower to reach the other side of the base cut off by natural defenses, you have to rescue a card from a rat, the big battle with Metal Gear is followed by a frustrating fist fight battle with a major antagonist who just won't smurfing die... yeah the list kind of goes on.
While this may sound like a criticism, the fact is, I love me some MGS and so I wasn't really bothered by any of this. In truth, after bungling my way through the very disjointed Metal Gear, playing an incredibly refined 2D MGS in the form of this game was actually pretty incredible. Even the boss battles are actually clever, memorable, and pretty intense. The game introduces the Soliton Radar, the ability to crawl, vastly improves the enemy ability to detect Snake through sound and better sight. The game has some bizarre puzzles but I appreciate them, like one that involves catching a mouth with an important item. You get several types of rations in the game, and the item description actually tells you what is contained in each of them. One ration has cheese in it and you have to use it to lure out the mouse.
The bosses are far more elaborate than MG1 where most of them are just buffed normal soldier with some gimmick weapon. The Cyborg Ninja tries to constantly bum rush you and you have to use the environment to keep the distance between you while you snipe him with your SOCOM. Jungle Evil is one of the less stressful Sniper duels in the series but can still be a pain in the ass, one guy has you fight in a room rigged with explosives, hindering your movement and forcing you to take him down with his own specialty weapon much like the battle against Revolver Ocelot. The final climatic battle itself is also pretty intense being more puzzle meets run away from Jason Vorhees kind of intense as you grab various items to make a makeshift weapon while the boss stalks you around the room with a powerful machine gun. I was honestly pretty impressed how well this game really stood up to time, especially playing it almost twenty years after it was initially released.
The plot is also a bit better with lots of interesting moments between Snake, Gustav, Marv, Madnar, Holly, Grey Fox and Big Boss. The children were especially chilling when you first meet them and learn who is really running the place. It's still comically bad compared to some of the later MGS titles and the game has more wacky video game logic than most entries, but it kind of works for the title. I've been actually meaning to go back to this entry cause I had such a blast the first time through, especially compared to the first game which was more interesting for the novelty, but Metal Gear 2 is, dare I say it? A solid sequel to what will eventually become one of my favorite franchises in gaming. The music is pretty damn good as well as you can tell from the intro screen.
I've played the first one, but I never tried MG2. I have it, so I should try it out sometime.
I really liked metal gear 2 when I played it and have been considering playing it again. I was not expecting it to be as good as it was , even if it was so similar to mgs.
I really need to play through this series again soon though. It's been a while and I've been itching to play them.
45.Now we're going back to my arcade roots and one of the last fighting games I really dedicated myself to. This is specifically for the arcade version due to the PS1 port being awful and me not owning a Dreamcast, which is where you would go if you wanted to play arcade perfect ports back in the day. I'm actually still annoyed that I can't get an arcade perfect port for any of the consoles I own anymore. After Capcom had some success making arcade brawlers based on Marvel properties such as X-Men: Children of the Atom Marvel Super Heroes; Capcom started the Street Fighter Vs. series where these Marvel heroes battled it out with Cacomp's ever popular Street Fighter series with a new tag team feature that ended up becoming a popular mechanic used for later fighting games. This all eventually accumulated into what I felt was the Magnum Opus of the franchise: Marvel Vs. Capcom: Clash of the Super Heroes. No longer restricted to just the Street Fighter brand, Capcom pulled out some interesting choices for their side including fan favorites like Mega Man and Morrigan, as well as more obscure properties like Jin from Cyberbots or Capcom's former mascot back in the day, Captain Commando. In addition to the usual Tag Team mechanic. the game actually introduced the ability to perform a special mode that let you use and control both fighters at the same time with an infinite Hyper Bar for a short time frame which could be absolutely devastating when used correctly.Another new feature that was sadly retooled into something less interesting in the sequels, was the Assist Character. While it was possible to summon your partner for one attack starting with SFvsM title, this game "randomly" chose a special assist character you can summon who often had a unique move or special that could help you in battle like your partner without the threat of getting their ass kicked by a bad timed summon before our opponent pulled off a Super. It was also nice for giving some minor characters from both companies a chance to shine who probably never would, such as Jubilee from the X-Men franchise or Player Soldier 01 from Capcom's obscure Forgotten World arcade game.With that said, if anyone at Capcom was ever bored enough to ever read this, what the hell is up with your disdain for Breath of Fire with this franchise. We're four games in with a few special/ultimate editions and you still haven't put a single character from Breath of Fire in the games beyond the dumb card mechanic in UMvC3. Phoenix Wright isn't even a fighting game, and you have a character from it, Devil May Cry has three characters already, what the hell guys?
Part of the reason why I consider this game to be the best is largely because it feels way more balanced than the entries that came after it, while also retaining the deeper movesets and mechanics of the earlier games. While the series has always been best known for the spectacle of summoning screen swallowing death laser to take off 18% of your opponents health, the later entries kind of took that concept and ran with it, whereas vets of the older entries knew it was just eye candy for a game still rooted in classic street fighter mechanics with just more floaty physics to make it feel unique. Not to mention this game feels like it actually balanced the characters as opposed to MvC2 which basically threw back in a bunch of unbalanced characters from previous titles *cough* Sentinel and Magneto*cough* or made new unbalanced characters to exploit like Cable.
I also miss the fluid sprite animation of the earlier games. While the 3D models for MvC3 and Infinite don't look bad at all, I simply feel that Capcom has the absolute best sprite work, and a game like this just feels like it works better in this format than in 3D. Maybe it's just the nostalgia talking but this series and Street Fighter never felt the same once they jumped to 3D models.
My first job was a movie theater, and this game was featured in our "arcade" if you wanted to call it that. While I was never good at the earlier Vs. entries, I had a manager who was actually an expert fighting game player who ended up showing me the ropes after I begged him. Slowly but surely, I ended up really mastering this title and with the exception of Zangief, I ended up getting pretty good with almost every character. Hell, I found the game a few years ago, and learned I'm not as rusty as I thought and actually made it to Onslaught on a first try. My two favorite gaming memories was challenging my friend to the PS1 version where he exclusively used the secret variant characters and still lost to my team and only finally won a match by using an exploit to play as Onslaught, the game's final boss, and even then, he didn't win until the final form. My other favorite memory was playing in an arcade once and letting a guy choose my team for me and ended up giving me Ryu and Captain America, one guy I main in most Street Fighter games, the other I had just picked up and was having a blast with. I don't know which was funnier, him nearly troutting his pants when I switched Ryu into Akuma mode at the start of the fight, or when I nailed his War Machine with Captain America's Final Justice Super which does way more damage than people think it does. So yeah good times, and this is probably the last arcade fighter I really stuck to and learned the ins and outs of. In my dream arcade I want to make, this will definitely be there and you will all be more than welcomed to challenge me. This is one of those games that always takes me back to my high school days and the late 90s for sure.
I think I have this on my dreamcast! I'll have to double check that when I'm home.
44.Now for something a bit newer. Bloodborne is a spiritual spin-off from the Demon's/Dark Souls franchise which traded in Knights and squishy mages for dauper blokes in top hats with meat cleavers. Earlier this year, I slammed Demon's Souls, Dark Souls 1, and Bloodborne in the span of a few weeks. Ultimately Bloodborne came across as my favorite entry among the three for a variety of reasons.Set in the fictional town of Yharnam, the city is the home of the Healing Church who discovered a special blood and transfusion method that could cure any disease. The town prospered until it was afflicted by the Curse of the Beast, which began to transform the locals into monstrous werewolf like creatures. In the past Hunters and the Healing Church themselves would deal with the beasts, but as the scourge overran the town, soon the citizens themselves took up the hunt on certain nights. You play as a foreigner afflicted with an unknown disease, and you seek the paleblood to help cure you. When the story begins, your character is being treated by a doctor with a transfusion and you have a fever dream where a beast of blood tries to devour you before you are saved by some ugly cute pygmy skeleton creatures. When you awake, you find that no one is in the hospital with you except for a wounded beast that has broken in and murdered a few of the patients. You try to fight it off, only to be killed and wake up in a idealistic garden and cottage known as the Hunter's Dream. Tasked with helping in the Hunt, you're given some weapons and return to Yharnam where you must stalk the streets to kills the beasts, what transpires afterwards is a harrowing tale of gore, suffering, and the eldritch truth, as your character explores Yharnam and tries to figure out what the hell happened in Yharnam.Some people like to say that Bloodborne is a Dark Souls game but in truth, it actually has more in common with Demon's Souls mechanically speaking, as Bloodborne removes several of the user-friendly features from Dark Souls to return to the more narrative elements of Demon's Souls such as the safe hub world and the return to finite consumables for healing. Gameplay-wise, while Bloodborne retains the high skill and "die, die, and die again" difficulty and learning curves, the core mechanics have either been streamlined or altered to make the game more offense focus. This is best seen with the removal of shields as a left handed means of defense, and instead replaced with old school musket fire arms. Instead of deflecting an enemy attack to pull off a counter, your character interrupts it with a silver bullet to the face which stuns them long enough for your character to go in for the kill. On paper, it's the fundamentally the same principle, but hitting the enemy with the gun shot still injures them again, emphasizing a game more focused on the player character always being on the offense, much like action titles like Devil May Cry. This extends to character progression as well and equipment. Bloodborne drops weight load and poise, completing negating the "turtle" style of character development, if your character takes a hit from a twelve foot cleric beast, it's not only going to hurt but likely stun them by knocking them on their ass. Thus the game places heavier emphasis on dodging and finding openings, which frankly suited my own playstyle from the previous games much better. The coolest new feature is the Trick Weapons, hunter weapons that have dual functions like the famous saw blade you see in the artwork which can work as a fast light weapon in it's short form, or gain extra power by switching to it's giant two-handed meat cleaver form for extra power. There are actually some cool combo abilities with these types of weapons that can allow you to switch seamlessly from both modes and the weapons branch out from there as well. My starter weapon was a Cane Sword that could transform into a whip sword like Ivy's weapon from another series with "Soul" in the title. This proved to be a really great weapon because it could do three of the four strike types (Pierce, Slash, and Serrated) as well as having a special element bonus in it's cane form that helped with non-beast type enemies. The weapons mimic several weapon types from previous Souls titles but the dual nature allows for more seamless and interesting combat option, especially since you can equip two of these trick weapons at a time, effectively giving you four different weapons to use in battle. I also appreciate the fact the that stats available in this game finally have been worked out, with every stat option actually being valuable instead of some of the weird shenanigans from the previous games like Demon's Souls weird favoritism fro Clerics in terms of MP growth or Dark Souls having poison resistance be a separate stat for...reasons? Stuff like Arcane and Bloodtinge build on weapon types, so even if you go for a straight Strength/Skill build, throwing a few points into the other two actually has immediate benefits from Bloodtinge affecting your gun damage, to Arcane allowing you access to the Hunter Tools which are kind of like the game's version of magic but have other functions as well. Another interesting stat in this game is Insight and it's honestly one of my favorites because it affects the game world in various ways as the stat gets higher. The boss battles are also pretty fantastic with several memorable battles like Father Gasoigne, Vicar Amelia, Rom the Vaculous, and the Final Bosses are some pretty fun battles whom I love the lore for them.What ultimately drew me to this game more than say Dark Souls is the setting and lore. Truth be told, I'm not a big high fantasy fan (of which I'm probably going to get some odd looks after the next two entries) and I usually need some element to really bring me into that type of setting. In fact, I actually like Demon's Souls world a little bit better than Dark Souls, because Demon's Souls feels like a Fantasy Horror world as opposed to Dark Souls kind of being a Dark Fantasy/Heroic Epic. Bloodborne returns us back to that horror element which I fully appreciate, but more importantly, it's a game that borrows heavily from one of my favorite horror authors, H.P. Lovecraft. Yep, you start off in some Universal Studio Monster movie and it eventually escalates to fighting off fish people, tentacle faced monstrosities, and the Old Ones.This is where that insight stat I mentioned comes into play. Like Lovecraft's works, as you the player gain more knowledge about Yharnam, the more you'll begin to see things you didn't know were there. Enemies gain new abilities, the doll in the Hunter's Dream comes to life, you begin to see "things" that have always been in Yharnam, but no one seems to actually see except for the few notes left behind by those who did and went mad from the revelations. Like Lovecraft, there is a great use of the world of dreams. The Hunter's Dream itself looks like a peaceful garden and workshop, but it's really a prison that traps you and the other occupants there until you survive the night. You can even venture into Nightmare realms where humans can finally meet with the Old Ones. The lore and setting are just really awesome, especially for a Lovecraft fan like myself. I also love the characters in this game. Many of the non-crazy Hunter's you meet are instead shellshocked veterans who will leave you questioning your actions in the game; while the citizens are far less trusting and generally more tragic figures than the ones from previous Souls games. The game even twists around some of the stuff from previous Souls games by giving you two "safe" havens to send NPCs. There are some really interesting story arcs for these characters if you can figure it out. Yharnam itself is just eerie and gives a real Silent Hill kind of vibe which I appreciate, especially with the game's gorgeous soundtrack.Also, much like Dark Souls, I love the DLC known as the Old Hunters, where the player can travel to the Hunter's Nightmare, a dream world that serves as both a punishment for blood drunk hunters as well as the hell for several of the most important figures in the story's lore such as Ludwig the founder of the Healing Church Hunters, Laurence the Founder and first Vicar of the Healing Church, as well as giving background insight on what the healing church was doing to the people of Yharnam and the true sins of the Hunters. Not only does it have some of my favorite dungeons, but easily some of the best boss battles in the game like Lady Maria and Orphan of Kos. The Fishing Hamlet area is a creepy and great send up to Lovecraft's Shadow over Innsmouth story. If I'm going to criticize the game for anything, it's that the Chalice Dungeons are kind of a buzzkill. They are copy paste type dungeons with Dark Souls reject enemies and some serious balancing issues. The bosses of these dungeons seem to either fall into "wait that was the boss" level of difficulty to "I need to post in the broken controller thread" there is like no middle ground and the dungeons themselves get repetitive. Bloodborne is pretty short, especially considering how massive Dark Souls was in comparison, and part of me wonders if these were added to kind of make the game feel longer. Thankfully, the lore behind them works on paper and still holds to Lovecraft principles, and more importantly, they are completely optional, but they do have some great stuff in them and can work as a great time waster/leveling hub. My other beef is that the Online component which really sets these games apart from the pack is hidden behind the paywall of whether you have a PS+ account, which is annoying but not damning for me. Other than that, if you have a PS4 and want to get into them Souls game but don't want to venture into the controversial sequels, give this game a shot. Especially if you're a fan of horror games and Lovecraft. In truth, this is actually my favorite exclusive for the PS4 currently, and while I doubt it will ever receive a sequel, I would love to see Miyazaki and his team make something similar in the future cause three for three, they've made some pretty outstanding games.
I can never love Bloodborne like I love Dark Souls, but it's still like a 9/10 game instead of a 10/10 (and of course I use a "real" 10 point scale rather than the 7-10 range that game reviewers use).
Bloodborne sounds interesting but it looks too scary for me.
There are only a few scary places in the game to be honest, and frankly the biggest fear factors in this game is typical of the Soulsborne series where you accidentally aggro something you really didn't intend to fight at that moment. Most of the really eerie places are in the DLC and the scariest section of the game, which is the Choir's Research Facility is not only optional, but someplace you're likely not going to find without a guide.
Now if you're the type who gets freaked out easily by body horror, then this game might be a bit intense for you.
I'll have my next entry up in a bit.
43.Now to move the entire other side of the spectrum from gory gothic horror, we have my favorite Dragon Quest entry in the series. I will say now that while I have played varying versions of it, I'm going to try and stick to the GBC version due to it being the first version I played and the one I remember the most fondly. With that said, I have screenshots from other versions due to google image search telling me that no one really bothered to play this version, so you'll likely being seeing some screens from the Super Famicom or iOS versions. In the summer of 2001, I had recently graduated from high school and was stuck on a family trip to Florida. I was able to bring my Game Boy Color and my new copy of DQIII I got with it, that I had kind of been ignoring. To offset the boring car ride and my needy family, I took a serious dive into DQIII and found myself incredibly immersed by the whole experience. What it lacked in gripping narrative and visual eye candy, it made up for with lots of variety, well-rounded design with lots of options, and DQ's greatest strength: the sense of accomplishment from the game's various mini-victories. Only old school games ever give you a sense of satisfaction for going off the beaten path in a dungeon to find a new weapon, which may not even be a super weapon, but just raises your stats enough to feel worth it. It's the little victories that make this and many old school titles a serious treat for me. I didn't finish it on the vacation due to the GBC devouring all the batteries I bought, but I didn't finish it later that Fall around my birthday. This game and DQVIII I feel are the two games that I always think about around Fall season, and I'll still get in the mood to play through the franchise that time of year.The Kingdom of Aliahan has grown increasingly concerned with the rising power of the Archfiend Baramos, who wishes to conquer the world. Sensing he may soon succeed, they task their greatest hero Ortega to journey to Baramos' castle and slay the demon king. Despite leaving behind his wife and newborn child, Ortega undergoes the journey and, in time, is never heard from again while Baramos' influence continues to expand. Sixteen years later, you, the child of Ortega, are now tasked with fulfilling your father's quest and must build a party of adventurers to travel the world and stop Baramos. In hindsight, I really feel like DQIII is quite possibly the best RPG on the NES/Famicom. There is so much this game does right, and it has far more staying power than a lot of other RPGs available in the 8-bit era. It also does a lot of crap that modern games still get praised for, such as allowing you to choose the heroes gender, heavy customization mechanics, and day and night cycles that affect the monsters encountered and change the dialogue and towns. The definitive version to me, is the Super Famicom remake, from which the GBC and later ports all borrow from as it adds quite a few new mechanics to increase the games depth such as the Mini-Medal side quest from later games, Pachisi Game boards, and the new personality system. In the remakes intro, your character has a dream concerning a mysterious voice in which you get to choose your gender and name. Afterward, the voice decides to see what your character truly entails and makes you do a few mini-scenarios that help define your character better. These scenarios are often pretty clever, and people familiar with the GBA FFIV port will notice similarities to Cecil's optional Lunar Trial. My favorite scenario has your character transformed into a monster, with a village trying to hunt you down. There are also ones concerning corrupt nobles and Good Samaritan scenarios. Depending on how you choose, your character is given a personality which directly affects your stat growth, such as Macho types giving boosts to strength and endurance at the cost of Intelligence and MP growth. There are even personality traits that are exclusive to gender. Once the dream is over, your character speaks with the king and is sent on their quest. Here you can stop by Ruidia's Tavern and find adventurers to help you. You get to build these characters by selecting the job and gender and then using Stat Raising seeds to customize their ability. Personalities are randomly assigned, but you can always re-roll a character if it doesn't work out the way you want. The original had seven jobs you could acquire: Warrior, Fighter, Mage, Cleric, Merchant, Goof-Off/Jester, and the hidden Sage class. The remakes add Thieves as an eighth class. Your hero is restricted to the Hero class, but the class has above average stat growth and a host of unique spells and equipment that compensates for being locked out of the class system. Where the class system really shines is that you can eventually reach Dharma Temple (No I'm not using the mobile names), where at Lv. 20 a character can change jobs but be returned to Lv. 1 with their stats halved from their previous jobs. This means that these Lv. Characters will be significantly stronger compared to their original versions and as long as you follow the rules of having the character be Lv. 20, you can do this indefinitely to build incredibly powerful custom parties. In fact, once you beat the game, you can drop the hero and build your own custom team. This level of customization depth was unheard of for it's time, and may actually be the most broken customization system in the franchise. Also, some gear can actually change your character's personality as long as it's equipped, and spells learned in a class are retained across job changes, meaning you can turn a mage into a warrior with magic, and then use an item to offset the stat growth modifiers to something more beneficial. See? Broken, of course, it's also time-consuming as hell. Another interesting treat about the game is that the world map is actually loosely based on the real world, with many of the game's locations lining up with real world places and the towns following suit. There is a pyramid you can visit to steal a pharaoh's treasure which will curse your party to fight a battle every step until you leave the place (in the original, the curse never leaves) and the Japan themed town has you re-enact the Orochi Tale which I find kind of amusing considering that the other half of my time on this vacation was ogling the new screenshots for FFX, which borrows heavily from the Japanese myth. This game ultimately established the DQ Formula of having every location have its own story, which builds into the greater narrative of finding and slaying the Demon Lord. From smoothing over relations between Elves and Humans in one town, to stopping the game's comic relief villain from his newest scheme, to even sending one of your own party as a Merchant to start their own town only to have to save them later from an angry mob when their egos grow too big. It's all quite memorable, and I still think fondly of the adventures I had with this game.The biggest element that impressed me about this game is the huge plot twist 3/4ths of the way into the game. I am actually going to spoil this, so if you hope to play this in the future and want to leave this a surprise, you can and should skip this part. 3/4ths of the way in, your party will reach Baramos Castle and fell the Arch demon. During the victory celebration, you learn that Baramos was simply an underling of a more powerful Demon Lord from another world. To truly save the land, your character must travel to this dark dimension, which turns out to be Alefgard from DQI and II. After undertaking a quest to create the weapons needed to stop Zoma and restore light to the world with your Orb of Light, your character finds themselves trapped in the world forever but also a legendary hero given the title of Loto/Erdrick, meaning this whole time, you've been playing a prequel to the first two games in the series. This idea was sch a hit, Hori used it again in DQVI concerning the origin of Zenithia, and it's legendary gear. Overall, the game is a great classic NES RPG with good music, a great story, cool locations and ideas, as well as rewarding gameplay. It left quite the impression on me, despite DQI and VII being my first forays into the franchise. I still consider it to be the most clever and best made entry in the franchise, and I'm not surprised at all that Japan still regards it as one of the best in the series.
Perhaps my actual favorite game as a child. I rate it as the 3rd best DQ game in the series.
DQIII wooo!
Its one of my favorite RPGs of all time and I've never even played outside the original NES version. It was perfection without those little additions. Having played through the first two games first made the spoilery ending all the better.
I have played the later versions also and I prefer the NES version myself. The only thing I "missed" when going back to it again was the dumb little mini-games in the casinos.Quote:
Originally Posted by theundeadhero
The twist in DQIII is really quite good. I don't like it as much as some others, but it was fun.
42. Oh man, this game takes me back. When I used to collect Game Pro magazines and the Sega CD was a big deal, I remember seeing all the promos and ads for this game and the awesome anime artwork. I was sad I couldn't really play it since I was just a kid. Fast-forward to 99, everyone is super excited for FFVIII to come out, and I picked up an obscure gaming magazine that had a neat article concerning first impressions of the Japanese version of the game. Except the cover article looked really familiar to me. Turned out Lunar got a remake and thanks to Working Designs (God rest their beautiful souls) was headed to the west for PlayStation. I finally had my chance to play a game that eluded me in my childhood.I honestly had a blast. In an era where game designers were trying to impress people with quirky designs or gorgeous 3D graphics, it was kind of nice to play something so unapologetic and old school. I'm not going to try and sell the gameplay here. It's turn base, each character has their own skills, and you have as much customization options as you do in FFIV. It's vanilla, non-offensive, and some may say it's boring. I feel it gets the job done. The plot itself also feels incredibly vanilla. Alex lives in a small backwoods village and dreams of following in the footsteps of his hero Dragonmaster Dyne who also was born in the town of Burg and his grave stand son a hill. Also dreaming of adventure and getting away from home is Ramus, the mayor's son, who is more interested in running a business than taking over his father's position as head of the town. Along with Nall, a talking flying cat creature Alex grew up with and his childhood friend Luna, a girl adopted by Alex's family with mysterious powers associated with her singing; the four visit the local cavern that holds Quark, one of Dyne's dragons, in hopes of finding a precious stone. Quark senses that Alex has great potential and with the gem in hand, the boys decide to head to Meriba to sell the gem and start their adventure with a reluctant Luna. On their way, they meet up with an adventurer named Laike who gives Alex advice on how to follow in Dyne's footsteps, and Nash, a top student of the Magic Guild on his way home. It's all typical RPG shenanigans with the party meeting and losing friends on the way, and meeting with the great heroes who fought alongside Dyne such as his close friend and a powerful sorcerer Ghaleon and Hell Mel the beast-man. The group soon discover that a sinister army from the outlands of Lunar, led by the sinister Magic Emperor, have their sights on taking over the world. Alex discovers his destiny, Luna learns about her past, obvious betrayals, a story about a new generation following in the footsteps of the old heroes, yada yada muda muda, you get the point. This game is not taking ideas from the big book of clichés, technically by historical definition, it is the book. So the plot isn't really going to throw any curveballs either. So what pray tell let this game get this far on the list?Mainly the characters, but I would also say the game also does the other elements well enough or at least in such an inoffensive way that it's easy to just give it a pass on it's perceived shortcomings. The battle system has no thrills, but it's still fun and rewarding. The plot has a "been there, done that" vibe, but it's so charming and colorful that you're never really going to mind. The cast is mostly stock tropes, but the characters are so warm, friendly, and well written that it's difficult not to fall in love with them. For a game released in the early days of the Golden Era of RPGs (90s to early 2000s) it holds up surprisingly well despite how much the genre has advanced. I mean, I love quiet and adventure seeking Alex, bossy Nall, charming Luna, arrogant Nash, boisterous Jessica, humble Mia, and goof ball Kyle, and that's just the core cast. The game is filled with wacky characters and there is almost an odd, Studio Ghibli vibe to the charm this game gives off that makes you feel nostalgic for good old fantasy. Another factor I love is the hilarious localization the game is given. Sometimes if descends into juvenile toilet humor, but it adds a fun flavor to a game that could easily be very generic otherwise. NPCs will say pop culture references, towns have unique dialect or weird backstories to make them feel a bit more interesting, and the game is very tongue in cheek about everything, which really works to give this lighthearted romp of an adventure the extra push to feel like something greater than it is. The game is also filled with new animated cutscenes by Studio GONZO of all places, which are gorgeous and filled with some of the game's best moments. The lone exception being the game's ending when Alex must face the final threat to Lunar which cannot be won through a battle but instead with a certain item Alex never let go of, and it's really touching to see. Lunar is pretty unique for me, it's one of the very few JRPGs that I appreciate for its simple adventure and fun cast of characters rather than some deep meaningful message or philosophical angle. It's a simple warm soup and piece of bread on a snowy evening, simple, but all you need to feel warm and peaceful as you watch the snow fall.
Ohhh we have that I am excited to play it!
Was expensive
Lunar SSSC remains one of my favorite RPGs. I don't have much to add to the praise. The characters and writing are just so endearing and surprisingly heart-warming. It's relatively short by modern standards, and everything about it is just fun. Kyle and Nall are non-stop hilarity, and the music and animated cutscenes are fantastic.
Also in an era that had a bunch of terrible voice-acting, Lunar SSSC stands out with its excellent cast.
41.
Now we've come to my favorite Mario game of all time. In the fourth grade, I was invited to a classmate's house for his birthday. He got an SNES for his birthday, and we hooked it up that night and played it until morning. A few years later, I got my own SNES with World, Mario All-Stars, and another game that's on this list. Despite owning the previous entries, this is actually the first Mario entry I've ever beaten.
There has always been an argument over whether Super Mario Bros 3 or Super Mario World is the best 2D Mario game, and to be fair, they both have a lot of similarities. I feel that what makes Mario World Stand out to me more is that despite having almost the same amount of levels, World tends to have multiple paths within their levels that open up the world differently. SMB3 had the stages pretty much blocked out, and needed to be completed in some relative order to reach all stages, but World hid the maps to you, so you couldn't see how many stages there were, and the alternate exits could open up pathways and reach stages you may not have realized was there. This dynamic layout always felt more exciting to me than SMB3's static design, and secondly, the fact that many of these stages could only be opened by finding alternate exits within stages often meant really combing the levels and increase replay value.
SMB3 had some cool alternate mini-games on the stage for fun, but I prefer World's more intriguing secrets like the Block Palaces that would fill in the special blocks, and the Star Warps that lead you to Star Road, and eventually the Special Zone. The secrets in World simply felt more meaningful as you got rewarded with quick travel, extra stages, and unique Yoshi's. My absolute favorite secret is completing the Special Zone and unlocking the Fall version of Super Mario World, which was a nice Easter egg.
Boss battles have a bit more variety to them as well. The Koopa Kids all basically fought the same way in SMB3, but World made them a little unique by at least giving us a few different types of battles. It isn't a huge leap, but I appreciate the effort. Also, the Ghost Houses are some of the coolest stages in this game and brings us back everything cool about the Fortress Stages in SMB3 but making them even more twisted since the Ghost Houses will likely be the player's real first taste of having multiple paths to complete the stage.
The level design overall is pretty solid in this game, which is par the course for the franchise, but World is devoid of some of the more obnoxious stages from previous games. I still shutter when I think about Pipe World from SMB3, whereas World has only a few small handfuls of stages I actively dread. While the removal of the various costumes is a bit sad, I felt the new item mechanic in the game was a bit more functional and less exploitative than SMB3's system, where I could save a few P-Wings to trivialize half the stages in a world I don't like. Though, we probably could have done without Yoshi's Secret Stage that allows you to get infinite 1-UPs. It's not like World is terribly difficult to begin with compared to say... Super Mario Bros. 2: The Lost Levels.
Overall, the cool new enemies, better world set-up, cool secrets and tight level design has always made this game one of my favorites. Letting Mario ride around on a dinosaur was also pretty rad, too. Man, the 90s, what a time to be a kid and a gamer.
Lunar had some fantastic characters. It's gameplay was a little old school (I only played it recently), but the characters and writing more than made up for it.
A long time ago, my mom's grandma died and left her some money. So my parents took us to Sears and told us we could pick out one system. SNES and Genesis were both set up with a demo at the Sears. On Genesis I played Sonic the Hedgehog and on SNES I played Super Mario World. I immediately fell in love with SMW and the choice was easy. It's one of the best games ever!
I love Mario world. I played the psp version of silver star story and enjoyed it. I'm not sure how different it is from the ps1 version. I did like the characters and such, but I think I would have liked it all more had I played it back when the ps1 version came out.
I love this game so much. Partly because it has one of the most incredible modding scenes ever. Seriously.
40.
An RPG released late in the SNES's life cycle. I feel slightly bad for this game because it was released the same year as Chrono Trigger in Japan, the same year as Super Mario RPG in the States, and the same year as FFVII in Europe. It doesn't really surprise me that people have never heard of this game and none of this is helped by the fact that it looks like a pre-FFVI RPG. I only discovered it thanks to a friend who would buy anything up with the RPG genre slapped onto it. Him lending me this game allowed me to fall in love and eventually pick up my own copy. Developed by Neverland, who is probably better known for their Rune Factory series, the game was originally called Estpolis Denki (Biography of Estpolis) published by Taito, which was bought out by Square, which is how SE kind of acquired the rights to the franchise in later years and developed an Action-RPG remake, that tries too hard to update the game for "cool kids". Course I might still just be a bit bitter about that...
Despite the 2, in the title, Lufia 2 is actually a prequel to the first title: Lufia & The Fortress of Doom, which was a sub par Dragon Quest clone with some unique puzzles and a cool prologue, which is actually the ending of this game. Set a hundred years before the first game, Lufia deals with the story of Maxim, a legendary hero fated to save the world from the Sinastrals, powerful gods who refuse to relinquish their control over the world and let the Age of Man begin.
Maxim is a monster hunter who lives in a small village of Elcid with his childhood friend Tia. Tia wants Maxim to get his thirst for adventure out of his system so they can finally settle down together, but the rise of the monsters now attacking villages as well as the prophecy of the mysterious woman Iris has Maxim gladly leave his home and travel the world to uncover the truth about the monster uprisings as well as his destiny. Tia reluctantly joins him and eventually he meets up and joins the bruiser Guy, who teams up with Maxim to rescue his sister; Selan, the commander of the Parcelyte Kingdom and a powerful magic sword woman; and Dekar, the bodyguard of the Prince of Bound, and a stupidly awesome badass who is awesomely badass because he's a bit too dumb to understand the kind of danger he's in. The group encounter the Sinistral Gades, the God of Destruction who levels a town and threatens to sink the continent into the sea unless Maxim defeats him. Their battle with Gades becomes a major turning point that puts Maxim on his path to become a legend and the tragedy that follows.
It may be hard to read that and look at these screenshots and feel like this game is anything more than some generic romp through typical fantasy tropes. Yet Lufia 2 is incredibly deceptive in it's presentation, and story. The plot actually plays the "heroes of destiny" spiel incredibly straight, and it becomes apparent that Maxim and his allies really are different. This is beautifully played out with Tia, Maxim's childhood friend and starting love interest. She wants Maxim to finally settle down and stop his need to fight and adventure, but it becomes increasingly apparent to her as the journey continues that this is who Maxim really is. A normal peaceful life is simply not something he really ever wanted, and his other allies have similar issues of restlessness and the constant need for conflict. It creates an interesting way of looking at some of the heroes of other stories in comparison. I mean, can an ordinary person really understand a person destined to slay gods? That's not to say that Maxim is unknowable, surprisingly enough, he actually winds up settling down and having a family midway through the game before the Sinistrals return and he's back into adventure. His actual growth as character from his teen years into adulthood stems from the fact that before he fought for the need to do so, but after raising a family, he actually has something to protect. It's very subtle, but something I appreciate the game doing. Hell, one of the bigger twists in the game and by extension, the whole series is that Maxim beating Gades in the first half of the game doomed his descendants and the planet to face the wrath of the Sinistrals for centuries to come. It's elements like this that make the game stand out to me. The emotional ending is also quite powerful, leaving this game on a very strong note despite it's generic beginnings.
Gameplay is the real treat of this game. Don't let the cartoony and generic fantasy setting fool you, Lufia 2 has some serious depth under the hood. While all characters are predetermined to fall into the typical RPG dynamic of Warrior/Mage/Red Mage with people who can use spells buying up magic scrolls in shops and their spell selection being determined by their class, the game has the awesome IP system to add several layers of actual customization. Basically, IP is a bar that goes up as your character takes damage and it can used in junction with IP Attacks which are connected to the characters equipment. So, your character might have an Agility Rind that speeds them up when equipped, but also grants the character the ability to use a speed increasing spell with the IP system. Using these abilities drains IP, so they can't be used consecutively unless the cost of the move is small enough,but the game offers a wealth of unique moves that allow characters like Dekar and Guy, who have no magic ability to have unique special moves to help turn the tide of battle. Every piece of equipment can potentially have an IP ability and it's possible to build your party around the abilities instead of just which gear has better stats. One of the accessory slots allows you to equip Rocks given by enemies that allow you to use some of their signature moves which gives a nice Blue Mage vibe to the system, hell you can even acquire some of the Sinstrals weapons and get access to some of their unique moves like Gades Sword which allows a character to attack eight times in a row.
Another cool feature are the Capsule Monsters, seven special monsters you can find in the game, each one based on one of the elements in the game along with non-elemental. They act as an A.I. controlled fifth party member that can't be healed or resurrected in battle but get fully restored after every encounter. These guys not only offer a nice decoy for your party in long stretches of dungeon crawling, but also can become quite powerful with enough levels and through evolutions. Evolution? Yes, by feeding the monsters the equipment you don't use, they begin to slowly grow as seen through a bar. Once the bar is filled, the monster will evolve into a new form with new attacks and better stats. Their final forms are as powerful and as durable as a full party member, so it's worth evolving all of them.
Dungeons are unique because not only can you see the enemies on the screen, they only move in relation to your own movement, so you can effectively get out of fighting by being careful when walking around a room. It's even used for some of the puzzles. Probably the most defining element of the game for me is the Zelda style puzzles in all of the dungeons. They are frankly more memorable than the bosses to be honest. Maxim will also gain tools to use like a hookshot to cross ledges, arrows to strike switches from afar and even a Reset move when you seriously smurf up. There is one puzzle late in the game that stumped me so bad, I had to photocopy the solution from an old issue of Nintendo Power at the library, just so I can move on. I still have it taped to the cartridge.
Another cool element is the Ancient Cave, a rogue-like sidequest where your party is stripped of all of their gear and returned to lv. 1 in order to tackle this 99 floored behemoth. It lacks the puzzles of the main dungeons and is pure dungeon crawler but offers many exciting challenges. The best part is that while most gear you find is taken away when you leave, there are some unique gear that can only be obtained here and they can seriously break the game if you're diligent enough and the RNG likes you enough to acquire early. The best part is that this gear will also not be removed when you try the dungeon, so you can effectively start the dungeon with an endgame armor or weapon. After beating the dungeon or NG+ you can unlock the Ancient Cave as a separate game from the start menu which allows you to assemble a team from any party member in the game, allowing you to use party configurations your normally can't. Another sidequest involves finding eight dragon eggs scattered in random dungeons which can be given to the Egg Dragon in exchange for a wish, Dragon Ball fans have fun. Also, as mentioned, the game has NG+, but unlike most games that let you start over with everything, Lufia 2 simply balances it out by having the enemies drop 1.5x more Gold and XP, allowing you to level faster and always be well equipped which makes multiple playthroughs faster without totally borking the challenge.
Overall, despite how lame the game looks, it has a pretty engaging story and some rocking gameplay that I still remember fondly. It was also one of the few SNES RPGs to be released in most of the regions surprisingly enough. It's a shame the later installments could never live up to this entry, and the first game is a generic dud, leaving this franchise a one-note wonder, but you can feel it's impact in later franchises like Wild Arms and Golden Sun which borrowed ideas from this title.
You are on a roll with the classics, Wolf. There are not many media where the sequel/prequel is better than the original but Lufia certainly is one of them.
I love Lufia 2, and I love the hilariously bad localization that it has. Wish more RPGs would do the puzzle dungeons.
Hey look it's that game I started an LP of and never finished :p
39.Now back to those Arcade roots. X-Men The Arcade game was developed by Konami and loosely based off of the pilot X-Men Cartoon, X-Men: Pryde of the X-Men, which is where many of the enemies and team line-up come from. This game was kind of a big deal back in the day due to being a six player co-op experience and I can say that when you do get all six people playing, this game seriously rocks. Magneto has captured and re-purposed the Sentinels to use in his war against humanity, which he uses to attack a city. The X-Men travle there to stop them and their leader, Pyro only to learn too late that the attack was a ruse used for Magento and his Brotherhood to capture Professor X and Kitty Pryde. Traveling to M Island, which is totally not a poor copy of the Savage Lands minus Sauron, the X-Men battle major enemies like White Queen (remember when she used to be a villain?), Wendigo, Nimrod, and Juggernaut to rescue Kitty, before heading up to Asteroid M to battle Magento himself and rescue Xavier. The game introduced, to me at least, specials which my dumbass kid self used to feel were actual powers the characters had in the case of Wolverine and Colossus which could be used to clear out swarms of enemies. I can honestly say that I really love the lineup as well in retrospect, especially giving Dazzler, who I always felt was underrated in the series, the limelight. This game also got me to really appreciate Nightcrawler and Colossus even more. Why this game is ultimately here, is not necessarily due to being a great game. I mean it's a fun co-op brawler don't get me wrong, but it's really here because it kind of coincides with my love affair with comic books and may have been the game that got me from casually knowing about comic books to actively wanting to check them out, which was later solidified with the X-Men Animated Series. So in a way, this game represents a pivotal part of my childhood (along with another arcade classic we'll get to pretty soon) and simply trying to learn more about the characters from this game made me seek out all of those back issues where I fell in love with the franchise. Truth be told, I was once a huge X-Men fan and I consider the era between the Post-Dark Phoenix Saga to the end of the Age of Apocalypse to be the franchises Golden Age (early 80s to almost the mid-90s) where the series kind of moved away from fun but kind of trashy pulp stories where the team regularly fought off aliens and Dracula, to a story that really began to focus more on the characters and the growing cynicism about Xavier's dream of mutant acceptance. I came in around the Jim Lee era when the second X-Men book got launched, but I kept digging backwards to witness Storm losing her powers, Rogue starting as a villains and then begging to join the team, Colossus watching his sister lose her innocence when the team was trapped in Limbo, Wolverine losing his wife Mariko, and both the dissolution of the team in Fall of the Mutants, to all of them combing back together on Genosha to fight Cameron Hodge in Extinction Agenda. The Jim Lee era was fantastic as well with the new team line-up, my favorite incarnation of X-Factor, and great story arcs like X-Cutioner's Song and Fatal Attraction before climaxing with the mother smurfing Age of Apocalypse. I grew up with these characters and this game still brings me back to those days where I wanted to know more, which is why it's on this list.
Ahahaha! Welcome to die!
I was a Nightcrawler player myself, and my brother was Colossus.
I'm going to be at a convention for most of the weekend, so updates will be infrequent for the next few days. Sorry about that, but I'm sure some people need to catch up.
So what has been your favorite game so far on this list, and which one surprised you the most?
I did not expect Chrono Cross to make the list, tbh. Personally, I loved the game, but I could never shake the impression that you didn't think too highly of it whenever I talked to you about it.
Probably Super Mario World or Mario 3. I get why they are quite high on the list though with them being platformers. Contra 3 as well.Quote:
Originally Posted by Wolf Kanno
All these three for me would be much higher. Although... what would it be ahead of?
*thinks about own list and explodes*
Actual favorite? Toss-up between Xenosaga, Dark Souls, and Dragon Quests, but the game I'm most impressed is on the list is Lufia.
FFIX when
Part of that might be because I usually either discuss the game in the context of it's battle mechanics, which I don't care for, or in relation to games it's similar to like Chrono Trigger or the Suikoden franchise. When I started this list, it was originally ranked at 100, but as I began to add more games and did comparison, it became obvious to me that CC was a better experience overall.Quote:
Originally Posted by Fynn
Another factor is that I know I have a tendency to be over-critical when discussing games, and that often overshadows my true feelings for games, making it unclear if I actually like some of the games I play. Part of the reason I did this list was to kind of overcome that reputation I've created for myself.
Tell me about it, the next couple of titles are games I thought would easily be in my top twenty, but after making the list, I realized I have too many games I love. If it wouldn't have driven me mad, I could have easily done a Top 200. There are like a dozen more arcade games I could have put on this list like Paperboy, 1942, Super Puzzle Fighter, and DarkStalkers.Quote:
Originally Posted by BubbaProbably Super Mario World or Mario 3. I get why they are quite high on the list though with them being platformers. Contra 3 as well.Quote:
Originally Posted by Wolf Kanno
All these three for me would be much higher. Although... what would it be ahead of?
*thinks about own list and explodes*
I think most people know I had a thing for Lufia when I brought up the Gaiden game in my Bottom RPG List, and when I convinced Fynn to do a Let's Play of Lufia 2. It is an incredibly overlooked game, but as I mentioned, it just had the misfortune of being released around some of the heavy hitters of the genre.Quote:
Originally Posted by Spuuky
You'll have to stay tune to find out.Quote:
Originally Posted by Pumpkin
The old school Nintendo games (SM3, SMW, original Zelda) are my personal favorites on your list so far.
The most surprising is Leisure Suit Larry. I mean, I liked it too. Those old Sierra games kick ass and there's probably 2-3 that would go on my list. I just never fathomed I'd ever see the words Leisure Suit Larry on this forum let alone in somebody's top 100 games list. My hat is off to you on that one sir.
That game is such an important part of my dysfunctional childhood, it would be a crime to omit it from the list. The real fun part about it was that while I was playing it, I was also going to a Southern Baptist private school, so I quickly became the unwholesome "worldly" kid cause I actually knew what sex was.Quote:
Originally Posted by Del Murder
I'm actually happy someone knew the original series, cause most people only know the more recent, and frankly terrible, party game entries.
FFXII is my favorite of the list so far... and I have a feeling that might very well not change.
Probably, since I have yet to really get around to the VN Genre, and the two FFs I know you love are two I particularly loathe (the Spira entries).Quote:
Originally Posted by Karifean
Then again, you never know, I still have 38 entries left on this list, and I can say now that I have two franchises I haven't even mentioned yet on this list that pop up in the top 30 or so.
I have the feeling they're not gonna be Call of Duty or FIFA?Quote:
Originally Posted by Wolf Kanno
I mean, depending on how much you consider them to be two different series, I'm fairly confident Persona is one of those two franchises.
Ooh, Persona. I was trying and failing to think of a second one, because my first guess was Suikoden.
38.One last arcade title for awhile, and the last that appeals to my nostalgic childhood. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was the reason I got into the arcade scene as a child because I smurfing love TMNT back in the day. The game is another Konami made arcade brawler, but one that has some interesting variety and little elements that set it apart from the other two brawlers on this list. The plot is simple and typical of most of these types of games. The Turtles discover that someone has set fire to April O'Neil's apartment and they got to rescue her, only to discover the Foot Clan is there and Shredder kidnaps her. The turtles then explore the whole city, fighting the foot and several familiar characters while tracking her down. You eventually rescue her and then head to the Technodrome to battle it out with Krang and Shredder himself.From the name dropping, it's obvious this game is based on the 80s animated series with familiar faces like Bebop and Rocksteady, Baxter Stockman, Krang, Lt. Granitor and General Traag. There are also some of the cool robots and vehicles from the show as well like the party wagon, and those goddamn mousers. It's still based on the early seasons so a few really popular characters don't make appearances until the later arcade title. You can play as either of the four turtles and if you had the right machine, could play four player co-op which is super fun, especially if you get the right group of people together for it and actually start forming tactics together and mitigating resources properly. What set this game apart back in the day from other beat em' ups was the fact the four turtles play slightly different from each other. Leonardo is balanced, Michelangelo is stronger but has short range, Raphael is the fastest but does the least damage, while Donatello is the strongest but slowest. Most levels are beat em type stuff, but their is one vehicle stage where your characters skateboard down a highway, which is surprisingly one of the nastier levels due to feeling longer than the others. The rematch battle where you have to fight both Bebop and Rocksteady really stands out cause you can recreate the scene from the show where the two simultaneously charge at the turtles and you can move away to have them collide with each other and knock themselves out. In fact the game has many small touches like this, especially interactive environments like parking meters and manhole covers that can be used as additional weapons. I used to play this game every chance I could get, especially since I was a huge fan of the franchise growing up. It lead me to force my dad to look for arcades which eventually lead me to find other games like Pac-Man, X-Men arcade, and eventually Street Fighter. So in a lot of ways, this was kind of a gateway title for me. It did get ported a few times. I own the NES port which only has two player co-op, uglier graphics and replaced the Bebop and Rocksteady fight with a new battle with Baxter Stockman's fly form, and added two new stages with unique bosses made for the game. I heard X-Box Live got a port, and I just found out today that some awful TMNT party game for the PS2 has it as an unlockable, so I may take the plunge to find it, if only to relive my childhood once more.
The game also got a really cool sequel in the form of the superior Turtles in Time, but due to Street Fighter taking over the arcade scene and beat-em ups kind of falling out of favor, I never got as much exposure to that game as I would like. It didn't help that I had already begun transitioning from the kid-friendly TV show to the darker X-Men comic books and series. Still, I played enough to know it's a pretty great sequel that is better than the original, but it's hard not to remember your first.
My favorite game on the list so far is Majora's Mask.
The most surprising entry so far for me is Metal Gear 2, because I'm one of like 3 people I know who've played that game in its entirety.
I have fond memories of the Turtles Arcade game, even if I've only played it a couple times.
TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES
TEENAGE MUTANT TURTLES
HERO'S IN A HALF SHELL
TURTLE POWER !!!
Fixed!Quote:
Originally Posted by maybee
:monster:
(SPOILER)Attachment 74030
37.One of the last "good, not great, but oh man that nostalgia!" titles on this list for at least a little while. I will fully admit that Castlevania has not aged as well as some of the later titles, and in terms of the Classicvania design, Rondo of Blood is superior in every way. With that said, this is like my third favorite NES game, and the game that kept me coming back to the franchise every so often.Set in 1691, Dracula's infamous castle of chaotic doom rises every hundred years to spread despair and suffering to the world, and every hundred years, a Belmont shows up to defeat him with the family's keepsake holy whip, Vampire Killer. This generation, it's Simon Belmont, but canonically, he's the fourth Belmont in the series since Castlevania did that DQ thing where some of the entries are a stealth prequel. The first game in the franchise, it was only released in Japan and North America, whereas the superior remake, Vampire Killer was released in Japan and Europe and featured a more Metroidvania style that North Americans would only get a taste of in the sequels. Simon has to tackle Dracula's freaky castle and battle it out with some of the most iconic monsters in cinema. In fact, the game is kind of a send-up to Universal Studios monster films, with several of the games bosses being iconic monsters like Frankenstein's Creature, the Mummy, and Dracula himself. Rounding it out is a Vampire Bat, Medusa, and that iconic and universally hated asshole, Death. You can see this influence by the fact that the menu screen has film reels on it and the credits blatantly reference joke versions of iconic actors in these types of films. While the game features only six levels, they are split up into three stages a piece and you're only given three lives to reach the boss to win. The first three stages are surprisingly easy, and then stage four happens which isn't terrible, but the battle against Igor and the Creature is the first real pain in the ass boss fight in the game. Death's stage, as is tradition, is a serious kick in the teeth especially the last hallway before you reach his chamber which is filled with sturdy axe throwing knights who love to back away from your reach and the universally loathed medusa heads. In a fun twist of fate, Death's stage isn't actually the Clock Tower, which became his token level for most of the franchise. Probably the biggest grief I can give the game is the brutal difficulty. Once of the reason why the last half of the game is significantly more difficult is because around that point, the game inexplicably decides that Simon needs to take double damage from everything. Yeah Death is a nightmare boss, but that's likely because it's really difficult to get through that last hallway of his without getting touched at least once, and after that, death only needs to hit you three times to kill you. Not helping any of this is Simon's sluggish controls. It's like the guy moves around with his pant pulled down around his ankles and he has some of the most awkward jumps outside of a N64 Zelda game that you can find for a game that has this much platforming. Still, there is a real sense of catharsis for victory in this game, perhaps the calling card of old school games. In fact, I was originally going to write this entry up yesterday when it dawned on me that I have never actually beaten it. I've always been stuck at death, so I powered through it last night. With a couple of breaks for my nerves, I did finally take down Dracula and beat one of my favorite childhood games. I only regret it took me so long to do so. While I am a huge fan of the original and some of the later installments, I've always been sad that I seem to miss out on the series. I have Simon's Quest, but my copy doesn't work very well. I've never had the pleasure to beat the hardest entry in the classic lineup which is Dracula's Curse, but I really want to check it out especially since it was one of the more popular entries and the one Igarashi references the most in the later Metroidvania titles. I also missed out on the superior remake of this game for the SNES. Yeah, I know, it's sad to say I'm a fan and have missed out on so many iconic entries. Perhaps I'll work to remedy this when I finish writing up this list. Due to being unable to find a decent commercial video for this game, I'm giving you a funny music video with an alternate explanation of the Belmont X Dracula feud. Just be careful, there are some dirty words in the lyrics.
My first Castlevania was Super Castlevania IV which was amazing. I also seem to remember playing through Simon's Quest in one sitting with a friend.
Oh my word... the music :love:
One of the few games that I could beat in my early teenage years, but have far more trouble with now. I last tired about three years ago and Death was the death of me, repeatedly. Still, the early NES "challenging platform" games are some of my favorites. Luckily, I can still beat Ninja Gaiden with only one death. Maybe one day I'll be able to beat the final boss trio without dying to the last guy *shakes fist*
Turtles in Time is the best TMNT game.
My Castlevania exploits last night had me pull out Simon's Quest and see if I can get it working, which I did and I'll try to play through it sometime in the future.
So here's some clues for the rest of the thirty bracket, let's see how many of you can figure them out.
- One game is about the bulltrout you go through when your friends have a criminal record.
- One game is about the horrors of oversleeping.
- One game shows how powerful whistling can be.
- One game shows why you should get out more and see the theater.
- One game is a cautionary tale about picking up shiny objects you find.
- One game is an interesting take on communication abilities.
- One game is what I feel may be the greatest licensed game of all time.
Obviously the last one is Superman 64.
Uhhhhh.... I think I see Secret of Mana and Chrono Trigger in there, but I'm not entirely sureQuote:
Originally Posted by Wolf Kanno
The only nes castlevania I own is Simons Quest, but I played through the original on an emulator. I've only beat it with save states I'm pretty sure. I was planning on trying to beat without save states, but I can't remember if I ever succeeded. I think symphony of the night is my favorite castlevania though.
36.
You know, for a second attempt at an RPG, by a company that doesn't make RPGs, Breath of Fire 2 is surprisingly good and a huge improvement over their freshmen effort. In music, a band's credibility is usually based on the success of their sophomore outing and I kind of feel that rule applies to video games as well. Released the same year as FFVI in Japan and nearly a year after the U.S. release of the same game. BoFII is a bit like Lufia 2, where it came late to the party and had to compete in the West with some of Square's stronger titles. Thankfully for me, I had caught the RPG bug by this point, and was gobbling up any JRPG I could get my hands on for the SNES. This was another game recommended to me by the same friend who got me into Sly Cooper, and this was my first Breath of Fire game as I had missed the first entry and never had much interest to check it out until a few years later.
Set several generations after the events of the first game, the warring Dragon Clans have disappeared into myth along with the Goddess Myria. In the small isolated village of Gate, a boy named Ryu lives with his father and little sister in the local church. Shortly after his sister Yua was born, Gate was attacked by demons and Ryu's mother died in the attack. His father fought off the beasts with his magic, but it was the untimely arrival of a massive dragon that saved the village, and the beast eventually perched itself over the mountain that overlooks the village and entered a deep slumber. Yua goes to the dragon and sleeps by it because she has dreams of her mama when she does so, when Ryu tries it, he has a terrible nightmare about a demon instead. When Ryu wakes from the dream, he finds that not only has his father and sister vanished from the village, but everyone in town doesn't know who he is either. He's taken in by the church as an orphan and meets an orphaned Grasslander (Dog people) named Bow, who travels from town to town, getting taken into the churches and then looting the place before disappearing. With no place to go, Ryu and Bow leave the town together and end up in a cave when the weather turns. Inside the cave, Ryu is confronted by the demon in his nightmare and it attacks...
Ten years later, Bow and Ryu have now become full fledged Rangers, a Guild that specializes in any kind of duty for a price, from house cleaning to monster slaying, they are the people to call for. Their first assignment is to find a local girls pet. After the successful mission, Bow is met in the middle of the night by a local nobleman who want him to break into the richest man in town's manor in order to steal back an item the rich man had stolen from the noble. Bow's attempted robbery fails when another thief beats him to the chase and Bow is left as the fall guy. Now running from the law, Ryu helps Bow escape and embarks on a journey to find the real thief, a girl with bat like wings named Patti. Ryu will meet many people on his journey and slowly comes to discover a nefarious plan by demons who are corrupting evil humans and sowing discord and chaos across the land.
Though technically a direct sequel to the first game, you can be forgiven for feeling like Capcom pulled an FF and simply kept a few legacy elements while changing around everything else. There are only a few callbacks to the original, and though the second title in the Myria Trilogy, not only does she not show up, but BoFIII doesn't even really bother to make any mention of anything from this entry, though it liberally borrows some thematic elements from it. The plot is pretty unique, though some elements have been overused by future RPGs. One thing that still blows most peoples minds about this game is that it was one of the few non-Western RPGs to make it to the West with a plot concerning a corrupted church. I want you to think about that, Nintendo of America wouldn't let FF use the word Holy because it might offend someone, but they completely let Capcom make a game about a Church secretly trying to resurrect a demon god and using their phony religion to con people into helping them. I'm not even going into all of the game's poorly hidden adult materials like the boy crazy witch being named Nympho, or how you have to fish a ring out of a toilet she's was throwing up in because she was drinking too much over her guy problems. There is also the part where the first shaman meets you and due to her risque dress, she basically propositions you like she was a hooker. Me thinks that Square and a lot of other companies back then could have gotten away with a lot more if they realized that NoA's bark was worse than their bite.
BoFII's plot also has a bit of a mood whiplash. The opening is pretty chilling and raises a lot of uncomfortable question, but then the game just skips ten years down the road and your first mission is played totally for laughs. On the journey to find the thief, you save one characters life from being murdered in a gladiatorial arena, learn that Nina has been exiled and shunned by her family due to her black wings, and save a town overrun by demons that are literal Aliens style face-huggers of which it's possible to kill their victims instead of saving them. All of that ends up being followed up with a farcical chapter where you have to help Jean prove he's the prince of his own home after an imposter sneaks in and takes his place... except Jean doesn't seem to mind that he's no longer a prince, and the town people know it's an imposter but either don't care who is in charge or some prefer the more competent imposter. I don't even want to go into the Queen of Tunlan who is becoming fat due to being possessed by demons and you have to travel inside her body to exorcise them.
The game has it's dark moments, especially in the beginning and end points, and whenever you really get to go into certain characters backstories like Nina's exile, Rand running away from home, and Sten's survival guilt for surviving a war without his unit; but the game is also just filled with some serious slapstick comedy. While I appreciate my games not to be too serious, BoFII walks a thin line and often crosses the line with ridiculousness, but if you can look past that, or are simply not bothered by such things, you'll find a really good story with fun characters. The game has three possible endings, and I honestly think the bittersweet normal ending is superior to the happily ever after Best ending.
After the very vanilla BoF1, it's pretty astounding to see how much of an improvement BoFII is. While the original had some overly simplistic game mechanics and was fairly unbalanced, one of the interesting strengths of the franchise has been the fact that Capcom really didn't know what they were doing back then, and so the game is filled with some really interesting gameplay ideas that seem unheard of for it's era, largely because Capcom didn't really know any better. This usually works really well for the games and helps set them apart from more traditional Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest games, as well as the many clones they created.
Like the first game, you will acquire nine party members with their own strengths and skills. Ryu is an all around brawler with a special skill that allows him to restore a certain percentage of his health if it succeeds. Bow is a combat medic with a risky blow skill that will either do 1hp of damage or critical hit. Katt is a glass cannon fighter with the highest agility and strength in the game with an ability to draw enemy fire towards her. You get the picture. In addition to these special FFIV style skills, most of the party can use some form of magic they learn by leveling up. There are some quirky character building elements within all this much like FFIV such as Katt pulling a Tellah/Naruto by learning all three of the highest level elemental spells in the game at a ridiculously early level, but not having enough AP to cast it. This is something that is brought up in the story due to her being kind of a simple ditz who wants to learn really powerful spells, so it makes sense she would teach herself overpowered moves despite not realizing she is incapable of using the spells. Sten the Highlander (Monkey People) has a play dead move which actually plays into his backstory. There are some really clever nods and tying in of the gameplay and story which I quite appreciate.
The party members are far better balanced than the original, with most of the cast having clear design purposes and roles to play in combat. Suffice to say, party configuration plays a big role in building a well rounded fighting unit. Yet the game has a few interesting ideas that really shake up what could have been a ho-hum formula with the Shaman System. At a certain point in the game, Ryu will meet a Shaman and her grandmother who deal with Shaman Fusion. There are six shamans in the world, each representing one of the four classical elements plus light and dark, and with them, you can fuse them with party members to confer up benefits like minor stat improvements or even a complete transformation that changes the characters appearances, stats, and skills. With this system, the game technically has 18 unique playable characters as the transformed characters can be radically different from their original. Jean the Frog is a perfect example as he is a slow tanky fighter mage who specializes in debuff magic. His special skill allows him to attack all enemies but with a very weak attack. His Holy Knight Fusion Form is pretty fast, far more melee orientated than his original form and his weak group hitting attack is exchanged for a powerful group hitting sword slice that will either miss or kill everything, making him a mini-Odin. It's a very interesting mechanic that is only hampered by some tedious rules that can make them impractical at times, but it's still super fun to play with.
Another unique feature of the series is that most of the party members have a unique map skill that can be used to help travel the world or collect items you can use. Bow can hunt wild animals with his Crossbow in special hunting ranges that appear on the map occasionally, Katt can destroy objects with her staff, Sten and Jean gain important skills that help you to reach normally inaccessible parts of the map or dungeon, and Ryu retains his unique skill of fishing, which has been changed from a silly gimmick from the first game into a full fledged mini-game which is surprisingly difficult but incredible rewarding since the fish can be used for a variety of purposes and he can fish up treasure and Manillo merchants as well. Some skills just make traveling easier, but the hunting and fishing mini-games help to break up the monotony of combat and help the player gain valuable healing items so they can free up their Zenny for equipment instead.
Speaking of mini-games, BoFII may have introduced the concept of town building to a standard RPG. I know DQIII had you help build a town but most of it was plot relevant and beyond naming it, you didn't get much say in it. This game allows you to build a town and search the world for people to live in it, which results in special shops or gifts to help you out. Even the look of the town can be customized based on which carpenter you hire to make the town and each form has a unique feature such as the basic home offering a restaurant where the carpenter's wife can cook items into stat raising ones, or the Mogul/Arabian design let you play the carpenter at a special board game for prizes. Making this even more complicated is the fact that you only have room for six residents, but their are twenty-four to choose from, with sets of four only being able to live in a particular house, so if you let the guy who sells you fish into the town, you can't recruit a character who would open a bank or one that would let you listen to all of the games music. Some residents can even permanently increase stats or teach characters abilities outside of their normal spell repertoire. It's a giant Guide Dang it, but frankly most of the game is in some places. I actually missed Ryu's second set of dragon forms due to them being completely optional and the teacher being squirreled away in an odd place. Yet, I feel it's one of the more interesting things about this game, it's incredible deep despite coming across initially as a pretty by the book adventure and I still discover new things in the game with every playthrough.
I will also point out that BoFII easily has some of the best sprite work of almost any SNES RPG. I think Chrono Trigger may offer a challenge an even then, I feel BoFII's battlefield models might be some of the best in the business. They are incredibly fluid in their animation and all of the enemy designs and animations help make battles more visually interesting than the static battle systems of other RPGs at the time. The music is also really catchy, and while it lacks some of the quieter pieces I usually prefer in my soundtracks, the rocking battle themes and upbeat catchy music that Capcom is good for still keep this game an audio treat.
The one major blemish this game suffers from is a terrible localization. The first game was localized and published in the West by Square, which anyone familiar with the FFIV translation will know how great they were back then...So Capcom took the plunge and did it themselves, with some questionable results. It may not be the worst translation I've seen, but like FFII (IV) it can be pretty bad in some places and I would advise checking out a fan translation if you can. It had a port on the GBA, but in addition with poor audio and visuals like many SNES ports for the system, Capcom didn't seem to bother taking this as an opportunity to give it a better translations so they largely just reused the old script with only a few minor changes. The more I think about it, the more I feel like this game really needs a remake. It has several great ideas that are only diminished by questionable balance rules and the devs being pretty new to RPGs in general. A remake could fix the script and potentially refine the gameplay into something pretty cool, but considering how indifferent Capcom seems to be to the franchise, we'll likely never see this happen.
I definitely liked the party member variety in BoFII
Alright guys, one down, can you guess the next one?Quote:
Originally Posted by Wolf Kanno
Here's another set of hints, each one corresponds with it's identical number:
- "You asked me once what was in Room 101. I told you that you knew the answer already. Everyone knows it. The thing that is in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world." ~O'Brian
- "In that land, we led a free and hardy life, with horse and rifle. ~ Teddy Roosevelt
- "Love me or hate me, both are in my favor... If you love me, I'll always be in your heart, if you hate me, I'll always be in your mind." ~ William Shakespeare
- "Unless someone like you cares an awful lot, nothing is going to get better, it's not." ~ The Lorax
- "With some, we're certain our hearts must have been acquainted, long before we ever met them." ~Shakieb Orgunwall
- "Work smarter, not harder." ~ Allan F. Mogensen
Quote:
Originally Posted by Wolf Kanno
https://68.media.tumblr.com/3927312e...Vwh1qccmug.pngQuote:
Originally Posted by Wolf Kanno
Nope, none of these games are Atlus titles. Two Square titles, one Capcom, one Konami, and two published by Sony. ;)Quote:
Originally Posted by FynnQuote:
Originally Posted by Wolf Kanno
https://68.media.tumblr.com/3927312e...Vwh1qccmug.pngQuote:
Originally Posted by Wolf Kanno
But you can't deny that it fits ;)
Whistling makes me think Shadow of the Collossus?Quote:
Originally Posted by Wolf Kanno
*Also makes motorcycle noises*
That is all.
Sadly, it fits better with that game than the one it's about. Course it was hard to come up with hints that didn't blatantly give it away.Quote:
Originally Posted by Fynn
I think number 2 is Red Dead and number 6 is Duck Tales. :D
35.I'm sure this may come as a surprise for some people.Looking at this game and a few others on this list, I feel I have a serious soft spot for really creative and ambitious games that never got finished and were simply pushed out to make some holiday sale window. MGSV is also just as interesting for all of the drama surrounding it's creation and the firing of Kojima as well as Konami basically pissing off their last really loyal overseas fanbase since the company has a better track record of killing off their franchises than even Capcom or Square-Enix. So yeah, there is a lot of emotions and controversies within the game and surrounding it, but for now, that doesn't really matter. The game itself is good, really good in fact. The plot is a bit more convoluted than previous MGS games, only because in order to get the most emotional impact from this game, you really need to have played all of the Kojima made Big Boss titles. There are call backs to MGS3, but a lot of the story and drama comes from Peace Walker and Ground Zeroes. This next part is going to be a bit spoilery for people who haven't played some of these entries, so you have been forewarned. After his mission in Russia to kill the Boss, Naked Snake received the title of Big Boss but threw it away and left the U.S. government, despite helping Zero to create an organization to steer the country back into the direction that The Boss wanted the world to be. Disenfranchised with politics and homeland, Snake becomes a mercenary and joins up with Kazuhiro "Master" Miller to form the Militaires Sans Fronteires (Military Without Frontiers) in the Central America area and begins dealing with the proxy wars between the U.S., Russians, and the local countries sadly caught in the middle. He takes on a mission in Costa Rica on the behalf of an obvious Russian spy and a local girl named Paz. Here Snake confronts some serious WarGames type shenanigans when he discovers Huey Emmerich (Otocan's dad) and a bisexual fangirl of The Boss known as Dr. Strangelove are building an A.I. Controlled Metal Gear called Peace Walker on the behalf of the asshole politician that setup the Boss in MGS3. Crap happens, robots are destroyed, Snake finally decides he is walking down a different path than the Boss and finally begins to take on his title as Bog Boss. That Paz girl turns out to be an enemy agent working for Cipher, an intelligence branch of the U.S. government led by Zero, who was trying to frame Snake to force him back into the fold. Paz hijacks Metal Gear Zeke but is taken out by Snake and presumed to be dead.In Ground Zeroes, Huey Emmerich sets up a UN nuclear inspection of the Militaires Sans Fronteires base in order to get the world governments off their back for having a nuclear weapon. Meanwhile, the group finds out that Paz is alive and is detained in a military prison in Cuba that is totally not a thinly disguised Guantanomo Bay expy called Camp Omega. Initially Snake and Kaz were going to ignore her, but Chico, a boy the group picked up in Peace Walker who has a very complicated relationship with Paz, decides to go rescue her and gets captured as well. Well known for being a blather mouth, Snake is forced to infiltrate the camp the night before the inspection where he uncovers that the two have been horribly tortured both physically, mentally, and emotionally by a mysterious man with a disfigured face called Skull Face, who is trying to discover the location of Zero and seems to have a grudge against both him and Snake. While the mission is ultimately successful, it turns out the whole thing, including the UN Inspection, was a ruse by Skull Face and his Cipher unit XOF to destroy the base and assassinate Snake and Kaz. Both survive, but Snake falls into a coma.Nine years later, Snake has finally waken, and is trying to recuperate in a hospital on a small island in the Mediterranean. His memory and mind are fuzzy due to the shrapnel he took in the explosion that put him in the coma, and he lost his left arm as well. Unfortunately, just as he awakens, Cipher discovers his location and sends a hit squad to kill him, at which point Snake receives help from a mysterious figure named Ishmael who may or not be real. The rest of the opening is quite surreal and cinematic. It may actually be one of the coolest sequences in the franchise history to be honest. Eventually Ishmael disappears and Snake is reunited with Revolver Ocelot who helps Snake get back in shape and updates him on what has been happening for the last nine years. Kaz suffered only minor injuries and in Big Boss's memory, formed Diamond Dogs as his new mercenary company for the two of them with the sole goal of burying Cipher and killing Skull Face. Unfortunately, Kaz has been captured in Afghanistan at the height of the Russian conflict, and the newly titled Venom Snake goes in to rescue him. He encounters the Skulls, a paranormal military unit with superhuman abilities that led to Kaz getting captured and connected to Skull Face. Their search for revenge leads them all across Afghanistan and into the heart of Central Africa as well. The two of them have to deal with the changes they have endured through war and torture as well as the way their hatred and need for revenge has begun to warp their morals. In a lot of ways, MGSV has a lot in common with two controversial MGS titles: MGS2 and MGS4. Like MGS2, the game is separated by two distinct chapters, in this case Ground Zeroes and The Phantom Pain, with the first chapter being a routine mission that ends up going out of control and resulting in the supposed death of the protagonist, the second half is a bit more of a surreal experience with many elements leading you to really question what you are seeing and discovering how some inconsequential details in one moments is actually a hint towards the games rather trippy non-ending. Both games also have the controversial ending which seem to only raise more questions and leaves you feeling like the story didn't really answer all of the questions. While some people would argue this is due to the game's troubled development, I feel like the game is too polished to feel totally incomplete and I'm pretty sure this was the planned ending all along. The game redoes a few ideas from MGS2, but I feel like Kojima has learned to do a better job of both getting his point across and while still controversial, I feel its safe to say from the little backlash it got, that is was not quite as controversial as MGS2 for fans. Like MGS4, Phantom Pain introduces a weird contrived science concept to explain away all of the weird trout in the game. I feel like Kojima was purposely trolling the fans like myself who bitched about MGS4's overuse of Nanomachines to explain away most of the plot. It feels almost a bit more satirical in this game but at least has some interesting elements that lead to some of the game's central themes about language, nationality and global control. Sadly, a lot of it kind of gets lost because we have to have a Metal Gear show up, by which I mean a goddamn Gundam. The other element it shares with MGS4 is retconning what you feel you know about the characters. Certain figures from Peace Walker become much more sinister figures in this game, and it's pretty obvious that Kaz himself has become a much darker figure than any of his previous incarnations, but he's not even the real surprise figure. Other figures get painted into being better people than you think, and if you were the type to get annoyed about the bombshell concerning the origins of the Patriots in MGS4, MGSV does a better job of explaining the whole mess in a better way.For a game with little in terms of story compared to the plot heavy series, MGSV is surprisingly powerful and more or less well told barring a missing episode concerning the end of Eli's story. Heroes become villains, villains turn out to be well intention extremist, and you'll definitely walk away from the experience with different views about several of the important figures in the MGS story. Yet I applaud it for not being as over the top and as fan servicy as MGS4 was, which had a bad habit of answering questions that didn't seem important and trying to to bring back ignored plot elements and haphazardly turn them into over dramatic plot fodder. The story has its fair share of nonsense, but it hits hard with the feels. Quiet for instance, may be one of my favorite female characters in the series despite her whole situation being a thinly veiled half ass excuse for gratuitous fan service. Yet, her story is pretty powerful when taken together and the ending will leave you a bit emotionally drained. I think my only major gripe with the plot is that some of the audio tapes should have been made into cutscenes. I feel some people would appreciate the ending more, had the Truth Tapes been adapted into actual cutscenes shown along with the normal ending. In fact the audio tapes still kind of bother me. I put up with them in PW because I felt the team was cutting corners to fit the whole game on the PSP, but in PP, it feels more like Kojima just giving a middle finger to fans who hated all the cutscenes and codec scenes. My real issue here is that it's hard for me to multitask, so whenever I needed to listen to the tapes, I would have to set the controller down and focus on it, otherwise I would get distracted if I was doing a mission or maintenance on Mother Base and have to restart the whole damn tape to keep my facts straight. My other gripe is that there are certain story/gameplay sequences that are unrepeatable without erasing your old file and starting a new one. Of course the crown jewel of the game is actually the gameplay, which is largely the reason it's so high on this list. I still find myself hopping this game back in to play around with it, which is a bit of a testament to the game as I rarely do this with MGS titles since I prefer them as a complete package. In fact one of my gripes with Peace Walker besides the game just not meshing well on the PSP was the "pick up and play" framework of the game, but I feel a lot of this has to do with the restrictive controls and dumbed down level design and enemy A.I. that compensated for the systems short comings standing in the way of making it fun for me. It took the series sixteen years since the leap to 3D to finally do it, but MGSV (and Ground Zeroes) has the most user-friendly interface and control scheme in the franchises history outside of the 2D entries. Switching from different weapons and combat styles is pretty damn seamless and while CQC is still a bit too easy for my taste, it has regained a lot of its options from MGS3 that both MGS4 and Peace Walker had removed, so it feels more meaty and useful. In a lot of ways, disregarding the games adopting open-world gameplay, the core structure of the game is basically Peace Walker's just finally built for console and with a better control scheme. You still capture enemy soldier to convert to your army, and between the usual stealth missions, the game adapts a building sim, where you need to allot soldiers to their proper units to help build up the Diamond Dogs with researchers to help build and arsenal of new weapons and toys to use on missions, combat units you can send out on missions to get more money and supplies, and other fields to help build a well oiled war machine. It's been improved from the original in small ways but some are much appreciated, I like the fact that you can slightly customize your base and even visit it which gives it a more personal touch than the boring text interface of PW. One of the biggest additions from PW and the series at large is the introduction of Buddies, special people you can bring along on missions to help you out in various ways. There are only four of them, but they actually have quite the impact on the gameplay. It's pretty amusing to feel like a total badass by getting a perfect score on a difficult mission with the help of D-Dog or Quiet, only to jump into the FOB Online missions and find out you are terrible at stealth because you over-rely on your buddy abilities. D-Horse is the game's best transportation with the ability to travel most terrains unhindered, and most enemies ignore the horse, so travel is pretty easy between side mission zones. D-Dog and Quiet are both pretty overpowered with their abilities to mark most enemy soldier in an area for you and their combat abilities. D-Walker is kind of the odd man out, being a bit too cumbersome for real stealth missions, but becomes a godsend on the missions where you need to take down the Skulls thanks to it's fire power. They bring some interesting dynamics to the game and it's super fun to replay missions with different buddies and load outs.The open world aspect of the game actually meshes incredibly well with MGS's core design. Yet, it's not terribly surprising because the series greatest strength has always been its open ended approach to levels and bosses, with multiple paths to your goal or multiple ways to beat a boss. The open world design simply allows the player to take it to another level as you can approach enemy bases from multiple directions, yet, MGS doesn't forget it's roots and there are several locations and missions associated with them that have a clear cut purposeful design like classical games in the series past. Of anything, the open world aspect simply makes what could have been the more tedious sections have more variety. One of the biggest contributing factors to all this is that the enemy tactics change to counter yours, which is absolutely brilliant. Do a lot of headshots? Enemies will start wearing helmets. Too many night missions, they all suddenly are sporting fashionable Night vision goggles. Love to CQC people, get ready for a shotun in the face. You can actually do missions which will temporarily prevent enemies from having access to these toold and weapons, but you don't have enough units to wipe out all of them at once, so you have to pick and choose which ones are more of an advantage for them, with the exception of Riot Gear, that should always go.There are also lots of fun little antics in this game, which is usual for the series. While the plot is pretty damn grim and very light on more lighthearted moments, the game makes up for it with wacky stuff in the gameplay department. Snake has a prosthetic arm in this game, so of course being a Japanese game, there is a Rocket Punch option. You can take down soem of the games hardest bosses with ridiculous methods like using ammo drops called in from Mother Base or even using a water gun to stop the Man on Fire. My personal favorite, and where I felt Konmai seriously dropped the ball with the DLC, is the ability to collect several 80s songs and giving you the ability to play them during missions on your walkmen or even have the Helicopter blair it loudly when it comes in for a kill strike or rescue. Nothing is more hilarious than wiping out an enemy base with A-Ha's Take on Me playing and then killing everyone with a chopper strike while its blaring Europe's the Final Countdown. it's silly and glorious all at once. I only wish Konami would have picked up a few more licensed tracks for it because I would have love to have Girls Just Want ot Have Fun blaring while I'm leveling up my female combat soldiers or the awkward moment of traveling with a car of knocked out soldiers across the African savahhna with the Cars Drive playing.I haven't gotten to the whole FOB stuff, which has it's fair share of shortcomings, but turned out to be a pretty enjoyable online experience where you can invade another players base and steal their resources and soldiers. I'm not a big fan of multiplayer titles as you can tell by the majority of my list consisting of single player experiences, and I lost my competitve drive years ago, so versus stuff doesn't interest me. Like MGS3 before it, despite my love of the main game, I have not bothered with MGO, like ever. I can still get behind the FOB missions because they offer some quirky challenges you can't get in the main game. Overall, I don't have many complaints against the game itself, except for maybe the lack of thrilling boss battles like in the first three games. I mean it's a vast improvement over Peace Walker's copy paste nonsense, but Man on Fire isn't quite the visual and "oh trout" factor of The Fury, Quiet is a fun sniper duel, but she's not quite as challenging as Sniper Wolf and The End, the Skulls are more annoying than fun to battle, and the games Metal Gear... well smurf that thing, I think it might be my least favorite Metal Gear with the possible excpetion of Peace Walker, but I need to replay that game to see how I feel now.In fact, that might be one of this games strengths is that while I was pretty lukewarm to Peace Walker, the MGSV Duology has made me pretty interested in replaying the game (with the console port to help smooth over the control issues) and while I still hate the circumstances of Ground Zeroes release and felt it should have been part of MGSV proper instead of being ut out to be an expensive demo, I'm still happy I played through it cause it really made this game feel more impactful. Overall, I feel that MGSV is the ending the series deserved, it askes as many questions as it answers and Kojima returned to his ideals concerning MGS2 in regards of making the player feel like part of the experience and leaving them to figure things out for themselves instead of having to sit them down and try to explain it all. If you haven't checked it out, it's a real gem of a game.
I still need to play through this. I only played a small part of it, but I did everything you could do in ground zeroes. Gameplay is fantastic, but what I've played and heard makes me think a little more could be done with the story. I don't mind the idea of listening to the tapes, but I feel like I'll agree with you on certain ones should be cutscenes. MGS4 did overdo it with lengthy cutscenes and such, but I thought the other games struck a better balance and wouldn't have minded something a little more similar to them in terms of storytelling. Not sure if that would be more difficult to do with the more open world nature of Phantom Pain, but yeah. Gameplay wise, it's practically perfect; but I don't think it will beat out MGS1 for me.
I only got to play the first half but the game definitely impressed. Couple gripes aside I was loving the Hitman style freedom in the missions. Take out the target however you like, or balloon the sucker, choices! And I like choices.
3rd ClueQuote:
Originally Posted by Wolf Kanno
AC3? Or perhaps RDR?
That waterfall scene in third clue's #4 definitely reminded me of Suikoden II. I get that vibe from the corresponding second hint as well, as a Jowy/Riou or Rune of the Beginning reference.
34.Long before FFVII was a thing on the PlayStation, this game was referred to as the best RPG on the system. In a lot of ways, Wild ARMS is a wonderful distilled RPG experience, and when I think about what an RPG should contain within it, this game and one other on this list, always come to mind first for me. Good story, likable cast, engaging villains you feel for, interesting setting, great puzzles, great dungeons, and tons of secrets that reward you for exploring the whole world,; Wild ARMS has it all.Yet, I may be getting ahead of myself.Set on the world of Filgaia, the planet was ravaged centuries ago by invading aliens called the Metal Demons who came to conquer the world. The industrial humans and the native Elws joined forces and used the power of the Guardians, sentient beings created from the lifeforce of the planet, to fight them off. They won the war, but not without severe consequences. The planet barely survived the ordeal, the Elws were nearly destroyed and eventually left the world after becoming disgusted with humanity's methods of using the same technology as the Metal Demons to fight them, the Guardians are so badly weaken they vanished and became just some mystical legend some people talk about except for a few settlements here and there that still believe in them, and mankind was largely knocked back to a stone age and has been slowly trying to rebuild civilization. Mankind has rebuilt itself in this wasteland to a stage of technology that closely resembles early industrial revolution and the U.S. frontier, but their are still castles and knights in some places based off the old civilization. The world is filled with Dream Chasers, drifters who wander the frontier wasteland looking for work and embracing their freedom to go where the wind takes them. Beginning the series tradition, Wild ARMS begins with a long prologue that involves choosing to follow individual stories of the game's primary cast. Rudy is a silent protagonist and a Dream Chaser looking for a place to belong. His story begins with him helping a small town rescue a lost child who accidentally wakes up a monster sealed by the Elw in a local cave. Rudy saves the child by revealing his ability to synchronize and skillfully use ARMs, ancient guns that are based on Metal Demon technology. The townsfolk turn on him and exile him from the town for bringing back a power that many fear. Jack is a Dream Chaser and Treasure hunter, who travels with his friend Hanpan, a talking Wind Mouse, in serach of the Ultimate Power so he can resolve some dark crisis from his past. Hist story begins with a rather comical satire on Indiana Jones, as he tries to plunder an Elw Ruin only to set off most of the booby traps. He does gain information that what he seeks may be in the Kingdom of Adelhyde. Cecilia Adelhyde is the princess and heir of the Kingdom, who has spent most of her life at the Curan Abbey learning magic. Her seventeenth birthday is approaching and she will soon be able to return home for good to take on her royal duties like protecting the Tear Drop pendant she wears. She is contacted by a mysterious voice within the abbey and uncovers a hidden library where she battles a monster and frees one of the Guardians who informs her that she is the chosen Innocent One, who can serve as a medium between the human world and the spiritual world of the Guardians, he informs her that a great calamity is about to befall the planet. The three characters meet in Adelhyde which is preparing a massive festival which is showing off ancient artifacts from the Demon Wars. Cecilia chooses to go incognito in order to investigate the calamity the guardians spoke of and ends up joining Jack and Rudy who are hired by the engineer Emma to exterminate a monster dwelling in a local ruin where some artifacts lay. Here they encounter the Golem, a series of massive machines built by humans and Elws to help protect the world from the invaders in the Demon War. In fact, Emma has excavated several of them, with this one being one of the last. So at this predictable point, you guessed it, the town gets attacked by demonic forces and it turns out the Metal Demons have returned. They injure Cecilia's father, steal the Golems, and devastate the kingdom until Cecilia gives in and hands over the Tear Drop to them. From this point the three band together as Cecilia and Jack both have connections to the Metal Demons and Rudy is asked to come along since his ARMs weapons work against the demons. At this point, Wild Arms continues to feel a bit typical by the book RPG. The demons, led by Zeikfried need the Tear Drop to wake their Mother up, who originally led the invasion of Filgaia but was sealed by the Guardians. They hope to conquer the planet for themselves because their own home world was destroyed by some calamity in the past and they've been looking for a new home. Granted, the current crop of Metal Demons were too young to fight in the past Demon War and only know their history and their Mother second hand. While this all sounds pretty generic, Wild ARMS has this interesting habit of completely subverting your expectations and changing the dynamics of the story and characters. The Metal Demons start off as typical chaotic evil bad guys, but eventually it's revealed they have their own struggles and bickering going on within their own ranks. Zeikfried may not give a damn about humanity, but he's doing everything he can to give his people a better life. Zed turns out to be a Gilgamesh expy and winds up having a a rather friendly rivalry with the heroes before he finds something important to him to protect that puts him at odds with his race. Lady Harkan is a tragic figure and Boomerang (an expy of Shadow from VI), A Metal Demon from the Demon War whose love of battle was so great, he bewitched Lucied, the Guardian of Desire to side with the Metal Demons over Filgaia, winds up having a more professional respect with the group. When Mother finally enters the plot, it dramatically changes the plot for the villains and they soon have to reassert what they all actually want from the war. The three central figures themselves also have some pretty good writing. A central theme of the game besides the ecological one, is the idea of "what is power? and what is it good for?" and while this theme permeates through all three character arcs, each have their own theme based on the power of the three greatest Guardians: Love, Courage, and Hope. Cecilia might be one of the best "Royals who want to be treated like People" stories I've actually seen in the genre. She struggles with her role as the "Innocent One" and her royal duties, her story is filled with tragedy after tragedy in the game's opening prologue but her personal story follows along "Love" as she learns that it's her compassionate heart that makes her worthy of her duty as both a royal and a spiritual medium. Jack has a pretty heartbreaking backstory, which surprisingly, the game shows you in the alternate opening, and his story is pretty good as Jack has to deal with discovering for himself what true power is to him. t first he seeks simply a power to destroy his enemies, but eventually learns that his laid back, almost apathetic attitude is one of the reasons why he doesn't understand what true power is and it's only when he grows up a little and comes to terms with his failures does he begin to really understand the real power he's been seeking. Rudy probably has it the roughest between the three. Despite being a silent protagonist/player surrogate, Rudy does in fact have a pretty involving back story that resembles Terra's backstory from FFVI in that he is an outcast blessed with a terrible power he never asked for that forever keeps him at arms length from society and this builds in him a terrible loneliness. There is actually a really interesting twist in his story about 3/4ths of the way into the plot that leads into his backstory about being raised by an archeologist who spent his life studying ARMs and the Metal Demon technology. He instilled in Rudy and unshakeable hope that one day, he'll meet people who will accept him. I know it sounds a bit sappy, but the game does a pretty good job of telling it. The rest of the cast is also quite memorable such as Marina the last Elw, Emma the eccentric scientist, Captain Bartholomew the comic relief, and goddamn Calamity Jane who may be the first Tsundere I ever encountered and is absolutely a blast as a character. There are other great themes in the game, and oddly enough, when taken into broad strokes, Wild ARM's story actually feels like a true intermediary between FFVI and VII despite not being developed by Square. The three main characters have several parallels to characters like Terra, Locke, and Cyan. Boomerang is practically Shadow without the backstory. The game has an underlying theme about forbidden powers that destroyed civilization coming back to haunt the present and likely redoing the whole mess again, the Guardians also share some characteristics with the Espers working both as guides to help the party while also serving as a tool in gameplay to help fight, and Filgaia itself feels like the Ruined World at times with a sense of hopelessness about the planet recovering. On the other side, I feel like Sakaguchi and Kitase may have been sharing drinks with the Wild ARMs team while working on VII because it surprising how many elements they share. An ecological theme centered around man's apathy for the plight of the planet dooming both, the planet being treated as a living being that all life is interconnected with, an ancient precursor race with advanced science and magic based on being in harmony with the planet and almost being wiped out by an alien threat they mostly dealt with, the last of their kind still in Filgaia is a flower girl who tends a flower garden in a place where nothing grows, an alien son obsessed with reviving his mother, said mother is basically what I would imagine what Jenova would have been like if she could talk and actually played more of a role in the story than plot device, the cast learns about the planet being alive and the ancient ways of living in harmony with the planet in the heavily Native American themed town of Baskar, the WEAPONS are expy's of Wild ARMs Golems both serving the purpose of protecting the planet from the alien invaders and ultimately turning on humanity as a series of optional bosses thanks to the villains, and the main character is sent into a coma after discovering a horrible truth about themselves that involves one of the characters diving into his subconscious and exploring his past to finally bring him out of it though the same thing happened with Terra in VI as well.Again, I would point out that this is all in broad strokes, and I feel VII had a slightly better mythology concerning the Lifestream, but it's interesting how this game almost feels like a missing link between the two RPG titans. As if Wild ARMs took a lot of concepts from VI and added their own thing, and then Square turned around and did the same thing to this game. Course the games were only a year apart in release and most of this is likely coincidental, but the parallels are interesting to examine. Gameplay-wise, Wild ARMS is also deceitful, it feels kind of bare bones compared to the deeper customization systems coming out of the genre around this time, but WA keeps it fresh by having all three characters play slightly different from each other. Rudy is a slow tank type character who can acquire various guns to use in battle, they pack quite the punch but they have limited ammo and their accuracy is independent from Rudy's stats forcing you to use them in conjunction with this Force skills to make the most of them. You can take his weapons to various Experts who can raise the weapons power, accuracy, and ammo; but each weapon still has a certain limit and some really powerful weapons are stuck with abysmal accuracy and ammo. Jack is the master of the Fast Draw sword technique which he learns from various statues, weather phenomena encounter in dungeons or story events. They are quite powerful, but usually really pricey, especially with his low MP. Jack can fix this by using special cards to permanently lower their spell costs, but they only work these skills. He's the strongest natural fighter and very fast, but his defense is lower than Rudy's. Cecilia uses magic which you obtain by acquiring Crest Glyphs, which you can use with a teacher to make various spells by combining two of the four classical elements to make the spell. You have total control of which spells she learns this way and can by pass status magic for more useful healing or offense magic if you choose. You can even dissolve a spell and make another so you're not really stuck with the choice either. Eventually she will meet an advanced teacher who can teach her a whole new set of advanced spells with higher attributes and the Randomizer Spell itself can occasionally let her cast a third tier you can't get access to any other way. All three characters are surprisingly broken, but the game it built around how overpowered they are, so it never feels too easy and some boss battles (like Boomerang) can be incredibly difficult if you're not prepared. Force abilities were introduced in this game which is basically a limit break bar that will give access to one of four skills based on how much of the bar is filled and whether the party has learned the skill or not. The second level is the same for everyone and grants access to summons, but the character can only summon the Guardian they have equipped. Guardians come in a huge variety and most of them have to be found by exploring the map based on clues from townsfolk or some of the optional dungeons. Each character has mostly unique Force abilities. Rudy starts with Lock On which raises his accuracy to 100% and is paramount for his ARMS, Jack gets Accelerator which allows him to take his turn first regardless of the enemy speed. Cecilia learns Mystic, which allows her to make an item effect the whole team instead of one character. These abilities keep everyone feeling a bit distinct and grow more powerful as they obtain new skills throughout the game. In addition to all of this, Wild ARMS is the spiritual successor to Lufia 2 and the dungeons are filled with ingenious puzzles to conquer instead of just straight combat or exploring a maze. To add greater variety, each character can obtain special tools needed to progress past certain traps like Hanpan the Wind Mouse who can cross gaps to hit switches or Rudy's rocket power skates needed to get past moving floors. The puzzles keep the dungeons exciting and memorable. The game is also just filled with secrets like optional dungeons, bosses, a coliseum, and finding all of the Guardians scattered around the world. There is surprisingly amount of content in this game and even some storylines don't reach their true conclusion unless you take the extra effort to backtrack and explore the world.Overall, Wild ARMs to me is a simple, if well made gem of a game. It may feel like a cliche fest for some in today';s modern age, but this game was pretty rocking back in 96. I love the cast, the story, and the overall design of the game. Also, have I mentioned how great the soundtrack is, especially the opening, which might be one of my favorite openings in an RPG.
God, I have a lot of fond memories of this game. Probably one of my favorite "classic" (vintage?) RPGs.
The seven songs that play after the defeat of the final boss all the way to the credits have been a permanent playlist on my phone for the last decade (I like to call it the Wild Arms Ending Suite). Michiko Naruke is an amazing composer!
Incidentally, I got this game as a PS1 classic for my 16th birthday along with Final Fantasy XIII. Kinda funny that the game I got as an afterthought stuck with me a lot longer. Hell, it introduced me to Trigun, arguably my favorite manga.
33.Like with most of the FF games, I'm not going to dwell on explaining the plot or game mechanics much because I'm sure we're all familiar with it and have our own opinions. All I will say regarding the gameplay is that with the exception of the tediously long battle intros, I don't really have much of a beef with the combat. I prefer regular chess to speed chess and considering how much of a gameplay crutch Limit breaks were in the previous games (and the ones after it) I actually like the fact that Trance was designed to be unreliable because it's not like this game needed to be extra easy. So with that said, let's get on with explaining why this game is here.FFIX came out halfway through my senior year of high school. After putting up with the other two PS1 FFs and their obnoxious fanbases, I was excited to see that IX was going to be more of a throwback title. I actually liked the art direction, and what little I had heard about the plot seemed pretty nice. I got the game for my birthday and quickly became obsessed as I consumed it's content. The first time I ever lied to call in sick for work was partly to get out of driving in the snow, and partly so I could keep playing this game. The game hit a lot of the right notes for me, and even just thinking about the game for any length has an odd way of putting a smile on my face. Much like FFV, I'm somewhat baffled that I don't play this game as much as I should. We often say that IX was a retro-throwback title, but I feel that's undercutting what it really is: a celebration. A celebration of what Final Fantasy is. The game is incredibly charming and mixes it's humor with its dark moments well. The stylized graphics are a bit cartooney as well as the characters, but it's one of the best looking games Square made on the PS1 only behind Chrono Cross and Vagrant Story for me. It brings back those great FF classes but expands them and adds a good development system to keep the player invested. It's world is filled with things to do and wonderful characters to meet. I laughed, I cried, I felt things, and I frankly don't feel things very often. None of this is to say that IX is perfect, but even with my minor gripes with the game and story, I still consider many of them to be minor and hardly enough to wreck the game for me. The game epitomizes what I love about the series and I love how well it can juxtapose some really deep and thoughtful moments in a game that looks like it was designed by Jim Henson. In fact, I honestly miss the more whimsical nature of the franchise as every entry after has been going with some odd stylized realism and getting more serious with each entry besides a dumb joke here and there. It's like all the "fun" and "quirkiness" of the franchise has been squeezed out of it and it's why I love coming back to this gem which is unashamed to wear it's oddball nature on it's stupid cuff sleeves. IX was originally designed to be a celebration of the what the series was and as a farewell to the PS1 that had put the franchise and company on the world stage, but in hindsight, I also feel like it was a farewell for the fans. For me, IX is the last Final Fantasy, everything after has simply been trying too hard to recapture the magic or just wind up being some guest-directors interpretation of the franchise, yet none of them, not even XII which is on this list, have ever come close to really hitting the feel of franchise for me like the first IX games do. So for me, it gets a bit touching when you reach the end of the game and you listen to Melodies of Life, only for it to segue into the Main Theme of Final Fantasy, even back in 2000, there was a real sense that this game was soret of the end of an era, and I feel it has only gotten more poignant as time goes on. Vivi, Steiner, and Freya are some of my favorite characters to pop up out of the series and Kuja is still one of the last truly standout villain to grace the series. The music was amazing, the game has some of my favorite cutscenes in the series from the Black Waltz, to the battle between Bahamut and Alexander, to the entire intro of the game. IX is still the last Final Fantasy.
:omgomg::omgomg::omgomg::omgomg::omgomg::omgomg:
Fun fact: I'm starting my first play through of FFIX very shortly :-)
Oh man, I loved Wild Arms! I remember nothing about it other than that I really enjoyed it. xD
FFIX was good too.
I stand corrected.
32.While the majority of games on this list could be said to be near and dear to my heart, Secret of Mana is a game that would easily rank in my top five most influential games for me. While I had dabbled in some PC and NES RPGs in the past, this is the game I consider to be my first true RPG. My friends in middle school were big on the genre and always wanted me to play some, but I was a arcade brat who liked his beat em ups and side scrolling shooters. So when this game came along, they used this as the game to bait me into playing the genre finally, and it didn't take long for me to get hooked. Even to this day, some of my fondest gaming memories from my childhood days are doing three player co-op with this. I still have a soft spot for the Sprite since I was always relegated to their character.
In the distant past, the power of Mana flowed throughout the world. Yet some wicked forces coveted its power and tried to take it all for themselves. They built the Mana Fortress to absorb all of its power and let themselves rule the world as a deity. Yet a mysterious hero arrived with the Sword of Mana and a Mana Beast. Together they destroyed the Mana Fortress and sealed its remnants away. The power of Mana was weakened terribly from this war, but soon began to slowly recover. The hero disappeared, but their sword lived on in legend going by many names. When our story begins, this history is now considered to be nothing more than a fairy tale. The new Vandole Empire has risen, an they too wish to monopolize the last remaining power of Mana and resurrect the fortress of legend.
When the game opens up, we are introduced to Randi, an orphan boy living in Potos Village who just wants to fit in. When he goes exploring with some other village kids near the forbidden waterfall, he gets swept away by the water and separated from the other children. He finds an old rusted sword that calls out to him. When he takes the sword from its Arthurian resting place, monsters begin to appear around his village. Randi discovers the sword is the actual Sword of Mana, its power all but nearly gone since the times of legend. Banished from his home for breaking the seal on the sword. Randi meets the Sage Luca whom tasks him with reviving the swords power and sealing the Seeds of Mana before the Empire can revive the Mana Fortress. On his way, he meets the spirited Primm, a Pandorian nobles daughter who has fallen in love with a lowly knight named Dyluck who has gone missing after a failed attack on the Witch Elinee's castle. Dyluck is now being prepared by the wicked Thanatos to serve as his new vessel and Primm pursues the two of them to rescue Dyluck. He also encounters an amnesiac Sprite named Popoi, an arrogant and boisterous being who is first met working as a con artist in the Dwarven Caves. Together, the three journey across the world seeking the Mana Seeds and trying their best to thwart the Vandole Empire. They are aided by the Eight Spirits of Mana and the baby dragon Flammie on their journey to stop the Mana Fortress' revival.
SoM's plot is pretty standard issue for JRPG plots. Mana itself has always been a series that revels in the themes of fairy tales, but I also feel like if you're goign to go that route, you should do it well. Secret of Mana does in my opinion as it combines old tropes like the Sword in the Stone, with tales of the Fair Folk, the evil empire slick, the legend of Midas, and even a wicked witch or two. I think what is most interesting about Mana is that despite the bright and cheerful colors and cutesy enemy designs, the game is incredibly dark. Its got its humorous moments of course, but overall, there is a real sense of hopelessness in the plot. Even the ending itself is incredibly bittersweet and most of the game's major subplots like Randi's parents, Primm's search for Dyluck, and Popoi trying to reclaim their memory usually takes a downward turn once they appear. I feel its this contrast and juxtaposition of the game's graphical style and story content that really impressed me about this game. SoM may have had a pretty poor translation when it first came out, but I feel the plot gets across pretty well overall, made more apparent to me when I played the remake and saw a more "complete" version of the script which can best be described as being a bit more elegant in presentation than the original, but still gets across the same information. The few significant changes are mostly callbacks to the first Mana game.
It's a bit ironic that it was an Action-RPG that finally got me into the genre of playing RPGs. The irony being that I'm not a big fan of the sub-genre and can be incredibly picky about the battle systems. This game is maybe one of five or six Action-RPGs on this list. It's not even for nostalgia either. Replaying the remake released a while ago, I was actually surprised how smart the gameplay is. The game reuses the Power Gauge mechanic from Final Fantasy Adventure which controls the power of your attacks. Once you swing a weapon the gauge depletes to 0 and slowly climbs back to 100%. You can actually swing the weapons with reckless abandon if you wish. but the power of the attack is based on that percentage between 0 and 100, so in order to do consistent max damage, you have to actually hold off attacking and let it recharge. This is an incredibly clever take on ATB if you think about it, and I'm a little sad future installments ignore this mechanic because it not only made combat more unique, but it gives the game an aspect I find lacking in most Action-RPGs which is a sense of tactics caused by overcoming limitations. I can't just go in swords swinging and hope for victory, I need to back off and let my power recharge, at which point I have to be careful of enemy attacks. Anyone who has taken any kind of combat training will know this is really closer to how fighting actually goes because you can't just fight continuously without tiring out. Helping things out here as well is the variety of weapon types you can use. While the group start with a Sword, knuckles, and a Boomerang; they will eventually gain a whole assortment of weapons that can be upgraded by Watts the Blacksmith. The Spirits of Mana the party encounter throughout the adventure will also lend their power and bequeath their magic power to Primm and Popoi. Primm's magic is support and healing based, while Popoi gains mostly offensive and debuff spells. Magic may be one of the only major criticisms I can give to the game's battle system as it ends up becoming a powerful crutch that will trivailize most boss fights as long as you keep up with leveling it. Seriously, as soon as the boss appears, just chain cast magic on them until you're out of MP with Popoi and then clean up with magic enhanced weapons. It will take out 95% of the bosses no problem except the final boss and every boss you face before magic becomes available. Hell, leveling Primm's magic is super easy as you can just chain cast her magic in friendly zones like Sage Luca's Water Temple and then just have Luca heal you for free as you chain cast it to the maximum level you can obtain at the moment. The only thing that keeps this from breaking the game is that Magic Level is capped at how many Mana Spirits you have at the time.
I feel one of SoM's cooler features that gets downplayed a lot is how it has a mostly seamless world. Following in the footsteps of games like The Legend of Zelda, there is no world map, its a seamless and sometimes open world for the most part. You do get gated of course, not like you can hop a few cannon travel rides to get to the Vandole Empire the second you leave Potos Village, but the areas can be huge and there are usually multiple paths you can take to reach the same destination in places. This also plays into how the game gives you two different means of meeting and recruiting Primm. Some players may witness her story by reaching Pnadora and visiting her house after meeting Dyluck and his crew, while other players can ignore going to Pandora to just make a beeline to the Dwarf Village to reach Elinee's Haunted Forest, where they'll meet Primm during a tough mini-boss fight instead as she tries to tackle the woods alone to rescue Dyluck. This means you can actually choose the order your recruit either of the other two party members, which was pretty neat for the console genre back in the day. Likewise, the maps have challenges that require use of some of the weapons to get through. You'll need long range weapons to flip crystal switches from across chasms. You'll need the whip itself to cross said chasms, and the Axe is needed to break down stone obstacles. Even in more straightforward maps, the gameplay is involving in a logical way. Again, this is something that isn't really considered speacil anymore but looking at SoM's design, it was really well thought out. The other major claim to the game was being one of the rare multiplayer RPGs. While most FFs did have a multiplayer style feature, due to the nature of the game, SoM played almost like an arcade beat em up with its multiplayer. To say you were a popular kid in school if you had both Secret of Mana and the multiap is an understatement.
Secret of Mana also has one of my favorite soundtracks from the 16-bit era. I still get goosebumps from hearing Fear of the Heavens, which is up there as one my all time favorite VGM tracks of all time. It is a damn shame that Hiroki Kikuta never stayed on as a composer for Square even as a freelance, because his work on both Secret of Mana and Trials of Mana are exceptional. While Mana has never had a token composer for the franchise since very few have stayed on the franchise for more than two entries; I'm sure if you asked any longtime fan of the franchise who the main composer of the franchise was it would likely be Hiroki Kikuta. Fun fact: Normally in this MIDI era, a composer would create the composition and hand it over to a sound engineer to convert the track into MIDI format. Being a complete control freak, Kikuta bypassed the enginners and composed the music using only the MIDI hardware so he would know exactly how it would sound. It shows how important this was too cause SoM is filled with really awesome tracks like Fear of the Heavens, Child of the Fairy Tribe, A Wish, Soul of the Night, Eternal Recurrence, The Eight Strokes of the Bell, Ceremony, Pure Night, The Sorceror, and Meridian Dance to name off a few. Hell, it would be easier to list off the tracks I'm not completely infatuated with.
Of all the Mana games, I feel SoM has the most interesting backstory to its development that plays into a personal theory of mine. You see, I feel SoM was the game that really changed how Square approached their future games. Its interesting how some of the more open ended design of SoM found itself in games like Final Fantasy VI and Chrono Trigger. Likewise, the use of Mode 7 Effects from this game were practically copied and psted into FFVI. Secret of Mana began its life as an exclusive for the upcoming Super Famicom CD-Rom Perirphial PlayStation. As many people know, Nintendo and Sony had a major disagreement over the system and eventually Nintendo sank the project which Sony turned around and released as their own system. What some don't know is what happened to a lot of the games that developers were making for the system such as SoM. Koichi Ishii had abeen a regualr at Square since the original Final Fantasy. He wanted to create his own game called Seiken Densetsu but was rejected in the early days until he was given free reigh to make Final Fantasy Gaiden (Final Fantasy Adventure for us NA fans) where he was able to sneak in his rogiinal ideas for an Action-RPG. The game did well enough for Ishii to be granted the chance to direct his own game. So along with Nasir Gebelli (Programmer of the NES FF games, and Mana being his final game for Square) and Hiromichi Tanaka as producer, Ishii was finally bale to make another entry in his Seiken Densetsu series and for the first time, had a lot of control over it. While the full scope of the game is unknown since developers kept poor records of this time, we do know that with the cancellation of the CD-Rom periphial caused the team to have to convert over everything they made for this game down into the smaller cartridge format. Some features that are known to have been lost was the fact the game originally had multiple endings and featured a more open ended playstyle with multiple story paths. A lot of the planned content had to either be cut or reworked to fit the older format, and this did create some technical issues, though I would point out that this may have also saved the game from dealing with loading times. Ishii estimates that about 40% of the original content had to be axed for the game and sadly I do feel it shows as the plot does feel a bit choppy in places which were not helped by the games skin of its teeth translation job by Ted Woolsey who had a mere 30 days to translate the whole game which was further hampered by the text being sent to him out of order and the game being stuck to using a font style that drastically limited how much could be displayed. Of anything, it's a miracle this game did so well in in North America.
Ishii has said that Secret of Mana feels like his own game, and he's right. While SoM is the second game in the series, it really should be considered the true first entry as Adventure still utilizes too many elements from Final Fantasy to be its own thing. Likely the reason Ishii choce to remake the game as Sword of Mana years later, which is an unapologetic Mana title that stripped out all the FF elements and crammed it full of Mana ones instead. Secret of Mana just has a unique and different feel from Adventure and having more creative control allowed Ishii to make a game that start the third pillar of Square's RPG juggernaut status in the mid 90s along with Final Fantasy and SaGa. Perhaps I lucked out and was simply part of an outlier group of people, but among my friends and gaming classmates, Secret of Mana and the Mana franchise in general were well regarded and praised on the same level as Final fantasy and Chrono Trigger. Even quirky Legend of Mana was pretty popualr among my peers at the time.
SoM finally allowed Ishii to create his own series, and this game inparticualr expanded the mythology and feel that would become quintessential for the series. Flammie, Rabites, the Mana Spirits, and a few other elements. Probably the biggest contribution is creating the central ecological theme of the series by merging the usual magical macguffin trope that runs rampant in the genre and by grounding it into this idea of Mana as a natural elemental force that is interconnected with life and the planet. While this isn't necessarily new for Square since the first Final Fantasy pulled this off as well, I don't really feel like FF has hit as close to Mana has on this message with a few major exceptions like V and VII. Helping to drive this mesaage is really the art direction of the game. Again, Mana has always had a more cutesy rt direction from other Square and JRPGs in general. Yet I've always felt this was intentional as a way to really show the corruption caused by the misuse of Mana. Rabites just don't look like something you should ever be worried about, and yet there is something unsetteling about having to chop them down left and right. This is especially poignant in this title as the story explains that monsters really didn't start to bother certain places like Potos Village until the Sword of Mana's seal was broken. It gets interesting to see how monsters go from being really cutesy like Tropicallo, who is a funny looking Palm Tree looking creature and then get further along to face something like the infamous Dark Lich. Again, that inner darkness and juxtapositon really plays well together in this series as most people who played this game back in the day will likely talk about how disturbing Thanatos is as a villain. Its scary to think that Hiromichi Tanaka has said the original script for this game was much darker. Somethign I feel most fans won't argue with considering how darker and edgier Trials of Mana turned out to be in comparison.
Likewise, another aspect I like about the game was how it really deconstructs and reconstructs the Arthurian Sword of Legend story angle. The Mana Sword is a rusty relic by the time Randi finds it, and even the knight Jemma feels he was only able to retrieve the weapon was because its power had faded too much. So randi finds himself in the ignoble task of having to try and restore the swords power since it was his fault for breaking the seal. He's treated as the unchosen one and many figures in the story, while happy to see the sword of legend return, are not quite as thrilled with the country bumpkin attached to it. This of course gets completely subverted towards the end of the game when its revealed that Randpossesses a bloodline connected to the Tribe of Mana and his father was the last Mana Knight. The deconstruction here is that while this gave Randi the power to weild the sword, he still had to work towards becoming worthy of its power by restoring it and stopping the Vandole Empire, making it much closer in line to some Arthurian myths in the process. Ishii has described his take on Mana as an unfolding mythology shown in the medium of video games. Funny enough, SoM feels abit bare bones compared to many of the games that came after it in this regard, but I feel the games interesting handling of old myths and legends really add to this fairy tale feel of the game that would become more and more predominate as the series grew.
Two years ago, Square-Enix finally released a remake of this game, and while I had a lot of fun replaying it, I'm not going to lie. I was a bit disappointed in it as I was hoping for SE to do more with the game, maybe try to add back some elements that were cut or add a few new features. Instead, I was given a graphical update at best, which itself is more humble than the powerhouse consoles the game was released for. I still stand by my theory that the remake was a Vita title originally that was then changed into a console port when it was almost finished. My bigger upset was that playing the upcoming Trials of Mana remake, which took great strives to translate the game into a true 3D gaming experience has me only thinking about what might had been if the same care had been placed on this title. Still, I am grateful that SE chose to remake the game anyway and to even release it again.
Mana was an important series for me growing up, and so seeing SE work to bring it back has been one of the most pleasant things to come out of the company in the past few years. Secret of Mana will always be a game near and dear to my heart. It formally introduced me to a life long love of JRPGs, and I still find the game to be inspiring to this day. despite my disappointment with the remake, I still had a blast playing through it because the core game holds up way better than I could imagine.While the game only clocks in at 32 for this list, I still have days where this game could creep into my top ten if I wanted to. This is easily my nostalgia title for the SNES and just thinking about this game makes me feel all warm and gooey inside as I remember fun summer evening playing this game to completion or awesome sleep overs at a friends house tackling the Mana Beast in multiplayer. Lately, some of my old college friends have wanted me to hang out with them to replay this game and if I can spare the time, I'm going to take them on the offer.
Original Script
If this was a list simply about the most important games in my life, this would probably top five material right here. While Battletech was my first real role-playing game and I had played a few Zelda titles here and there, this is what I actually think of when I talk about my first RPG. I had two friends in middle school who loved the genre and wanted me to play it and I always declined on the grounds that I loved action games more. So when one of them convinced me to try out an Action-RPG, I said "why the hell not?" and borrowed it. If I told myself then how much this game was going to open up both my passion for a new genre of games, but also something that would have more personal impacts on my life, I would probably laugh it off.I ended up buying the game from my friend, and I still have his older brother's save file on it where he renamed the main cast with "dick" in all of them. Childish, but hilarious even now for the blackmail potential.
A long time ago, evil forces once tried to take control of Mana, the primordial force that creates and controls the world, and built an evil fortress powered by it to subjugate the world. With the power of Mana draining from the machines engines, the world nearly lost the power of Mana until a warrior appeared, brandishing the Mana sword, who slayed the evil doers and stopped the Mana Fortress. While the warrior eventually passed on, his sword continued to be well known through legend as it changed owners hands before disappearing in the flow of time.
In the modern age, both the Sword of Mana and the Mana Fortress are simply myths and while great feats of magic are still possible with the little Mana left in the world, it's power too has faded to obscurity. One day, outside of the village of Potos, the orphan Randi travels with two boys in the village looking for a treasure rumored to be near the waterfall. The boys are trying to keep their treasure hunt a secret because the place is also forbidden. Randi slips on the log bridge and falls down the waterfall. Unharmed, he sees that the growth of vegetation has blocked his path and can't proceed. Looking for something to cut it, Randi discovers the shiny object, a rusted sword thrust into a stone. Hearing an odd voice calling for him, Randi takes the sword and a bright light flashes before he sees the vision of an eerie ghost. Despite the shock, Randi cuts his way out of the lake-bed and soon discovers monsters roaming the woods around the town, despite none ever being in the area. When he returns home, he's chastised for entering the forbidden area with the other boys before the elder sees in horror that Randi has the rusted sword which legend says if it was ever to be pulled out from its resting place, the village and world would soon face calamity. Blamed for the sudden appearance of monsters, Randi is attacked by one of the children before an earthquake swallows them up and they are nearly eaten by a Mantis monster. With the guidance of the Knight Jema and using the sword, Randi fights off the monster but is exiled from the village for his transgression. Jema informs him that the sword he holds is the legendary Mana Sword and tasks him with restoring the sword. On his journey, Randi meets Primm, a young feisty tomboy in search of her love Dyluck who disappeared on a mission for their village; and Popoi, a rare Sprite creature with amnesia who is trapped in the dwarven jails for his mischievous behavior. The three embark on a journey across the world to restore the sword and Mana itself while fighting off the evil forces who wish to revive the Mana Fortress for their own deeds.
Released in 93, Secret of Mana is a sequel to Final Fantasy Adventure (Seiken Densetsu: Final Fantasy Gaiden) and the first game in the series to bear the Mana title. Originally envisioned as Square's first major title to utilize CD-Rom technology on the new Super Famicom CD attachment being built by Sony, when the CD unit was scrapped, Square found themselves in the conundrum of having spent a large amount of time and money on the project with no system to release it. Not wishing for it to go to waste, the game was condensed onto the much smaller cartridge medium of the time. So if you ever wondered why Secret of Mana feels a bit choppy or say drops the plot and just starts telling you to go here and do this, that's why. This debacle is also pointed out by some people to be when Square started to form plans to leave Nintendo for another platform. Despite this hardship, the team did their best to build a rather groundbreaking Action-RPG which made use of the SNES multitap to have three player co-op, and I will say it was smurfing amazing back in the day to do so.
Gameplay is pretty simple on paper, but actually has a surprising amount of depth for it's time. You can walk around the screen and interact with monsters with the attack button. Every time you swing your weapon, a timer appears on the status bar showing how much longer until your next attack will be full power. You can swing with wild abandon if you wish, but your hits will be weak, whereas waiting for the timer to fill back up to 100% will guarantee a strong attack. I didn't really understand it when I first played, but it doesn't take long to instinctively realize what's going on. Primm and Popoi can use magic which involves pulling up the inventory screen and selecting the Mana Spirit you wish to summon and perform which spells. Primm focuses on healing and support magic, while Popoi gets mostly offensive magic. What's actually really groundbreaking about this game is the seamless world it creates, something borrowed from Zelda but still distinctively Square with the shops and greater emphasis on graphics. Your party actually travels to several unique locations ranging from deserts, snowy forests, a really cool forest that changes seasons as you pass through it, dark tombs and even the Moon. The Pure Lands are easily one of the most atmospheric locations in the game with it's gorgeous music and pain in the ass difficulty spike. In addition, the various weapons you gaincan also be used to pass obstacles like using the axe to break heavy wood barriers, or using the whip to traverse gaps between cliffs, the game has a cool Zelda-vibe going for it. Despite the game's cutesy designs and up beat soundtrack, Secret of Mana is a surprisingly somber experience. It's a bit funny to imagine how a game where your party kind of beats up Santa Claus (yes, that one) can also be a game with some truly gut-punching moments like Popoi regaining his memories, Primm and Dylucks story, as well as anytime Randi learns anything about his parents. The game's ending, like the whole franchise in general, is pretty bittersweet with the party having to fight a friend and and lose another. Helping the game's plot are some really great tracks by Hiroki Kikuta who went on to do Seiken Densetsu 3's OST as well.
What's really interesting about this game is also how much it radically changed a lot of RPGs after it. While Square had been experimenting with Mode 7 effects in earlier titles like FFIV and V as well as the Romancing SaGa series, it's interesting how many elements wound up in later games like FFVI and Chrono Trigger to give them some really cool psudeo-3D effects. In fact the whole layout of Flammie flying your party was copy and pasted for FFVI's airships. The game also experimented with better sprite work and finally moving the genre away from the traditional one graphics for traveling and other for fighting, as the sprites for exploration is the same in comabt, another feature seen many of Squares later 16-bit titles and something they stuck to in the PS1 generation when their knowledge of the tech would allow them to. In a lot of ways, this game is kind of the beginning of the new era for Square in terms of bringing about their visual and design philosophy they hold onto. While the game looks adn plays pretty simplistically b modern standards, this game was actually pretty groundbreaking and even before my friend lent the game to me, I was aware of it's existence because a lot of gaming mags I read at the time liked to do spotlights on it.
This is another one of those games where simply thinking about it really draws me back to parts of my childhood and I will honestly still get in the mood to play this game while watching videos of Sailor Moon or Gargoyles cause that's what I was into around the time I was playing this. I even wrote some awful stories that were close to blatant ripoffs of this game, but it really got my creative juices flowing and if I'm going to do the magic sword plot device, I kind of take my cues from this game.
I'm actually kind of excited to see this game get a remake next year. Despite the grating English voice they gave to Randi, I'm hoping to see if SE might either put back some of the cut content, or at least finally give us a decent translation outside of the mobile port. Of anything, it will be nice to play three player co-op again. If you haven't experienced this gem of a game yet, check it out. I'm still draggin my feet to play is supposed superior sequel, but I'm looking forward to it.
I played this on my iPhone and liked it a lot, but then near the end I just stopped playing and never came back to it. I have no idea why. I think I just got distracted and forgot about it. But maybe I'll get the 3D remake and fix that!
I have a fond memory of the first time I played through this game. I borrowed it from a friend of mine one summer, then happened to stay over at my cousin's house that night. We 24-hour marathoned it, beating it in that time. He wasn't really into RPGs but the action of combat really helped him stick it out. The memories of laughs and fun we had that night are far more prominent than anything that actually happened in the game. What I do remember is the intensity of the boss fights. It probably would have taken me much longer to get through them if I had to rely on AI instead of another person.
I actually don't think SD3 is superior (although it is very good). There's something uniquely charming about the world of SoM.
FFIX and SoM - both fantastic. Can't wait for the SoM remake. I still need to play Wild Arms.
I'm thinking of playing my next game on this list for a little while to get a better feel for what I should say about it. You still have your two remaining clues to figure out the next two. I feel the last one is kind of obvious with the clues, but surprised no one has come close to the next entry, but I probably made the hints too vague. I'll give you two more clues:
1st Clue
- One game is an interesting take on communication abilities.
- One game is what I feel may be the greatest licensed game of all time.
2nd Clue
- "With some, we're certain our hearts must have been acquainted, long before we ever met them." ~Shakieb Orgunwall
- "Work smarter, not harder." ~ Allan F. Mogensen
3rd Clue
#31
#30
Maybe you're just losing touch
On further review, my next entry is too good to be this low on the list and so I switched it with another title that I felt I was being a bit too generous about. Update will be tomor... I guess later today if my clock is right. ^^;
31.DuckTales was one of my favorite Disney cartoons growing up, and Scrooge McDuck is easily one of my favorite characters in the Disney pantheon. So it's not a huge surprise that I was a big fan of the game made by Capcom based on the cartoon show. This is actually the first NES game I had ever beaten, and the last licensed title on this list. Combining elements of Mega Man and Mario, DuckTales is a simple story about Scrooge traveling the world to obtain five of the great treasures of the world to build his fortune and prestige, or go bankrupt trying. Each world is based on a different location ranging from the infamous Amazon to the actual Moon. Scrooge uses his trusty cane to pogo stick off enemies heads and to send heavy objects flying to defeat opponents, destroy walls, and hit objects in the air. The gameplay elements are actually really clever and add some serious challenge to traversing the maps. At the time of it's creation, I feel Capcom had sort of hit a serious good stride for their platformers, because while this is my favorite entry, the other adaptiosn they did for Disney as well as a few other obscure standalone titles are all seriously solid contenders that are easily on par with Nintendo and Sega's mascot character franchises. Even more fun for me is how much Capcom took from the show to make the game. Most of the major Duck characters from the show make cameo appearances in the level, including divisive characters like Gizmo Duck and Bubba. The enemies and bosses are taken from the show as well. The aliens from the Moon level are based off an episode about a Star Trek knockoff getting picked up by real aliens. The weird subterranean people are featured heavily in the African Mines stage, and several other interesting nods to the show the game is an adaption of. Honestly, I love this game cause it hits all of the right notes of how a licensed title should be. Plenty of shout outs to the source material and actual solid gameplay. Alos, it's mother smurfing DuckTales, and what's not to love?
Let the record show that this is not even my favorite DuckTales game (that would be DuckTales: The Quest for Gold).
Woo-hoo!
Did you ever play the remake? What are thoughts on it compared to the original. I never played any of the old duck tales games but own the remake. I never could get into it, but I feel like I might like the original more.
No, I never felt the game could be improved by one, so I gave it a pass, but I may check it out someday. If it's similar to any Remake I've seen of old school platformers, then I'm sure they made the mistake of adding animation frames that weren't there which makes the game slightly slower than the original. I remember Rondo of Blood had that issue.Quote:
Originally Posted by Scotty_ffgamer
I'll eventually play the original. I've always liked the old capcom platformers.
30.And now for something completely different. :shifty:This one may come as a surprise to some of you, and for those it doesn't perhaps it's high ranking on my list will. Dance Dance Revolution is one of my favorite Rhythm games and my second favorite arcade series. I discovered this game just by frequenting arcades with a friend and the two of us decided, "why the hell not?". So we threw some quarters in played a song on Easy Mode, and were pretty badly humiliated in front of a crowd watching. Yet the two of us had a blast fumbling around the controls and resolved ourselves to get better. At which point the obsession kicked in and soon I was practicing at the arcade and trying to get the home version as well.Back when Konami was still a good company and made awesome games, their music arcade series was super popular in Japan. While DDR couldn't save the arcade scene here, it did give it a last little pop before the scene almost completely disappeared. There is no plot, you simply choose your difficulty mode, whether you want to play solo, two player, or doubles where you use both controls. Then you simply choose your songs and see if you can survive.
I think what I loved about the games was the fantastic selection of songs combined with the novelty and exercise I got out of it. I know I probably come across as a "Comic Book Guy" from the Simpsons who simply sits at his computer or TV playing games all day long, but I'm surprisingly athletic and in decent shape besides my upper body needing more love. So the physicality of the game was actually a selling point for me and I feel the game helped with my terrible core muscles. I know some people like playing the game to show off, I had one friend I introduced the game to who became more obsessed than I did and he loved going to arcades to show off his "mad skillz". I enjoyed the challenge and music more, which often got us into spats when we played with each other cause I loved doing some of the difficult slow songs whereas he hated them because they weren't flashy enough.
The music selection mostly sticks to dance style music with several remixes of classic songs or even just popular music when you played the home versions. I mean jamming out to David Bowie's "Let's Dance" is pretty neat, but the real treat for me was just playing the Bemani artist music. Bemani was Konami's music division that made all of their music arcade games including Guitar Freaks and Beatmania in addition to DDR, and they were filled with artist from their other series as well, including Silent Hills Akira Yamaoka. My favorite artist was easily Naoki Maeda who composed a good chunk of the music for the earlier entries including stand out tracks like "Dynamite Rave" which is considered DDR's theme song.
I know a lot of people are too embarrassed to play something like this, even in public, but much like karaoke, most people will applaud you for having the stones to try than whether you're actually good or not. I still invite everyone to give the game shot, it's super fun series and easier to get into than people think, you simply need to not get discouraged and remember not to return to the central square but stay on the arrow keys.
I had to quit DDR when I moved into an apartment building. Maybe some day I will return (although I mostly played Stepmania on the PC later, with the DDRs all imported).
I used to play it in the mall whenever I went there, but was never very good at it. A friend and I saw it one day, knew what it was, and we both instantly knew we were doing it. It became a tradition to play it every weekend or two. I imagine most people weren't very impressed. No one ever said anything to us, even though we got the occasional weird stare, but it was fun, and that's all that matters.
I think it irritated my parents when I played this back in middle and high school. I'd play for hours on end when I was most into it and trying to unlock everything. I just loved having something with a lot of music I enjoyed and arcadey gameplay to keep myself in shape. Unfortunately, I think all of my ddr mats are ruined or lost at this point, and I don't know if there is still anywhere around here that has a machine. I might have to buy another mat soon and play this again... it might help me get back into shape.
Not going to have time to do an entry today, so I'll instead play the hint game for the 20s. Here you go.
29. Attachment 74245
28. https://i.imgur.com/0aiYrr0.gif
27. https://i.makeagif.com/media/9-07-2015/U71s53.gif
26. Attachment 74246
25. Attachment 74247
24. Attachment 74248
23. https://bestgifs.makeagif.com/wp-con...girls-judo.gif
22. Attachment 74249
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If 29 isn't civilization I don't know what it could be. Mostly because of fighting Ghandi that aggressive, nuke happy, bastard.
I would guess it's another Street Fighter based on that gif.
You'll never see it coming~!Quote:
Originally Posted by Wolf Kanno
While I feel a few of them are pretty obvious, 23-21 will be the most difficult, especially the David Bowie one because as far as I know, only a few EoFFers have heard about that one. I'll give a hint to the GIFs to help you understand my logic.
29. Don't follow the quote, just the idea.
28. The lyrics to the song this GIF is from is the clue. How well do you know your 90s music?
27. Same as 28. How well do you know your 90s anime ending themes?
26. The video game equivalent.
25. Probably should have used the GIF from 29.
24. Kind of obvious... and pretty recent. How well do you know your 70s anime?
23. If you can guess 29, then just focus on the little kid aspect of the video.
22. He's kind of a robot cop I guess.
21. Don't focus on the words, just focus on which persona David Bowie is and think of that theme.
20. I feel this one is obvious. Focus on what San is known as to help.
I'll probably have 29 up later today.
OK so 27 is Bayonetta? And then 21 is Xenosaga because Ziggy Stardust?
Well considering I mentioned that Episode 1 was my favorite entry when I talked about it, the chances of the sequels showing up higher than it is looking slim. Besides, I also mentioned it was a game very few EoFFers have heard of, though I know Mirage is a fan of it. ;)Quote:
Originally Posted by Fynn
I also can't fathom where you're getting bayonetta from 27. I've never even played it to be honest.
Because it has Fly Me to the Moon for its main theme. Duh :roll2
So is it To the Moon then?
Fly me to the Moon.Quote:
Originally Posted by Fynn
No, I meant if the game is To The Moon. But judging by your response, I think I have my answer :p
29.Again, if I was doing a list on my top most impactful games, this would be in the top five. As I moved away from beat-em ups in the arcade scene, I happen upon Street Fighter and the 90s arcade revival scene it brought along with it. While I sucked back in the day due to being too dumb and poor to really dedicate myself to it and understand the rules and concepts of the medium; none of that dissuade me from liking the concept and obsessing over it as a kid. So much so that when I learned the games were coming to home console, I immediately wanted to see. I had my dad rent me a Sega Genesis at the time because it was the console I wanted to have after my Nintendo, but trying to play SFII on it with it's limited controller made me realize that the SNES would be a better choice if I wanted to play it and not have to buy an arcade stick to play the game properly. So in essence, this is the game that got me an SNES, which eventually lead to my RPG friends lending me Secret of Mana and FFVI, which eventually lead me to my love of the RPG genre. Go figure. I did learn some interesting tidbits about this game. SFII: Turbo was the direct result of Capcom shutting down a fan mod of Street Fighter II: Champion Editions called Street Fighter II: The Rainbow Edition where the designers heavily modified all of the games specials to ridiculous proportions like homing fireballs, Blanka Rolls that have him loop around the screen, and other shenanigans. The game also had ridiculous speed added to it, so Capcom shut down the game but then incorporated several ideas from it for this edition. The most obvious was boosting the games speed which was a must because the original was slow as hell and I still get kind of pissy when I feel like the game is a bit too slow. It also modified some moves and added new ones for characters. For instance, Chun-Li got a fireball in the fan mod, and Capcom apparently liked it enough to give it to her. Dhalsim also gained his teleport move and as far as I know, Guile's moveset was finalized for this game cause the man has never changed since. It was also nice that this game retained elements from Champion Edition like the ability to play as the bosses. This is probably the SF game I have spent the most time with, I even beat the game with every character and tried to go for the super secret higher difficulty endings, though I did fail on those ones. Sadly, while the SNES controller did offer the ability to use the whole moveset of the characters, that D-Pad still left much to be desired for performing special moves, so I probably wasn't quite at my peak for the series. Still I had an absolute blast with this title and it still remains one of my favorite SNES games.For those wondering, I'm a Shoto guy, but I also play Blanka, E.Honda, and M. Bison though I'm rusty with the last two. I want to get better with Chun-Li but her moveset doesn't mesh well with my style, same with Sagat.
Reminiscing about it, this does remind me that I have some of the later and more popular versions like Super Street Fighter II: Turbo and even Street Fighter III's later versions which I also enjoy, but this is the one I know the best which is why it's here and not them. Despite that, this game isn't my favorite entry in the franchise, but you'll understand that pretty soon.While I do like the fighting game genre, I never really strayed from Street Fighter or Capcom. I've played some Darkstalkers and even dabbled in Mortal Kombat with the second entry, but I've never really found the same kind of hook I got from this series. I think Guilty Gear may have been the closest.
I played SFII more but Turbo is just an upgraded version so I also lean towards that one. SFII was definitely a top 5 influential game of the 90s.
28.Oh man, I've been wanting to talk about this series for awhile now. Until I made this list, I didn't quite realize how much I really enjoyed this series and how angry I am that we'll never it's proper conclusion due to both Konami kind of killing the franchise and their new business model means it will probably never see a sequel after the PSP spin-off. In truth, this entry is the one responsible for really getting me invested in the series. While I had played and enjoyed the original, I missed the second entry and it wasn't until this game came out that I began to really take notice of the series and go back to fill in the missing gaps. I'll try to make the background synopsis brief: Very loosely based on the Chinese novel "The Water Margin" the series is set in a European/Asian influenced setting that is governed by 27 True Runes that each control a fundamental aspect of the world such as Fire, Life and Death, or even the Night. If a mortal should obtain one of these runes, they are granted immortality and eternal youth as well as the runes power. All magic in the world is derived from one of the runes as are many of the creatures that inhabit it. Suffice to say, these runes become a central element of conflict whenever they pop up in history and so the series follows a series of regional wars that erupt when countries and individuals battle it out for them. Central to the game is that all of them entail a hero caught up in a terrible war within their homelands caused by man's greed or historical circumstances and they decide to fight off the menace by building an army composed of 108 individuals to help them in their conquest. What makes the series stand uot besides it's strong casts political drama is the historical significance of the games one each other in their collected world. Events and characters in one game will sometimes wind up in later titles and this adds an interesting historical element to the games not seen in most fictional settings.Suikoden III is set 15 years after the Dunan Unification War (Suikoden II) in a region to the northwest called the Grasslands which is a territory controlled by the Six Clans of indeginous groups who find themselves in constant territorial disputes with the Zexen Federation, a merchant guild based country that formed on the western sea border and their industry keeps pushing them eastward into the Clans territory. Fifty years prior to the story, the land had been besieged by the Holy Kingdom of Harmonia (think fantasy Rome if it were more of a theocracy) who invaded the lands to obtain the True Fire Rune. A young warrior from the Clans, only known as the Flame Champion, obtained the Rune and united the clans to push back Harmonia. After a devastating battle where the Rune's power went out of control and nearly destroyed both armies, the Clans and Harmonia made a truce that would last for fifty years on the condition that Harmonia keep some of the territory they had acquired. The truce is coming to a close and the Clans themselves have been in constant conflict with Zexen for so long, the two sides are finally getting ready to sign their own peace accords, but other figures have their own intentions for the region and it's true rune. Unique to Suikoden III within the series, the game actually has three protagonists and the story is told from three distinct point of views through various chapters. Hugo is the son of Lucia (Suikoden II), the Chief of the Karaya Clan, and he's tasked with being the messenger to drop off records pertaining to the truce between the Six Clans and Zexen. Hugo fancies himself a warrior but he's too young to really understand the ramifications of war, and he is still confined by the prejudice between both groups against each other. He travels with his his pet Fubar, a baby Griffon he grew up with; Lulu, his childhood friend who is a few years younger than him; and Sgt. Joe, a member of the Duck Clan and the voice of reason in the group. When the war renews itself, Hugo is sidelined due to his position as future leader of the clans but also due to his age, he instead travels the Grasslands looking for the Flame Champion who saved them all years before.Chris Lightfellow is a member of the Zexen Knights who was recently promoted to Captain of the Knights after a recent battle that saw the deaths of the former commanders of the knights, and her own heroic bravery in leading the survivors to victory after such a devastating battle. Chris loves her homeland and wishes to protect it's people but she is weary of dealing with the Zexen Council who seem to be more motivated by their business interests than their people. Thrust into the spot of leadership as well as being a beloved hero of the people and a vile Red Baron-esque foe to the enemies, Chris is a bit overwhelmed by the pressure she's put under. While her closest knights all adore her and try to do what they can to help her burden, Chris still finds herself feeling melancholic about the mysterious disappearance of her father years ago and wonders now if he may still be alive somewhere. When the war renews, Chris starts by protecting her kingdom and even commits a war crime to save her men from a dire situation, afterwards she receives information that her father still lives and is in hiding somewhere in the Grasslands. Chris goes undercover with a Harmonian spy named Nash (SuikoGaiden series) to travel the Grasslands to learn more about her enemies and find her father who is connected to the Flame Champion. Geddoe is a mysterious mercenary and Captain of the Twelfth Unit of the Southern Defense Force, which is part of a large battalion of mercenaries used to guard Harmonia's borders from invasions. While on a mission in the Grasslands, Geddoe's unit gets orders to investigate the rumors of the return of the Flame Champion and to obtain his True Fire Rune if possible. With several connections within the Grasslands and Harmonia, Geddoe finds the sudden interest in the Flame Champion to be a bit too coincidental and begins investigating the issue which leads him to learn that not only is someone trying to re-spark the Zexen/Six Clan conflict, but also mobilize Harmonian forces to take advantage of the conflict. Geddoe's journey takes him farther than most of the characters and explores his mysterious connection with the Fire Bringers and their leader, the Flame Champion. A fourth POV character is also unlocked concerning Thomas, a young boy of about twelve who hails from the North Lands and is the illegitimate son of a Zexen Noble. Wishing to meet his father after his mother's death, his father sets him up in a rundown castle far to the north of the capital to save himself from scandal. Now Lord of the Castle, Thomas is tasked by the few remaining inhabitants to try to revitalize the commerce of the region and Thomas finds himself both discovering the castles connections to the Flame Champion, his own good business sense, and dealing again with an outsiders perspective on the Zexen Six Clans disputes. All three POV characters pass through at some point and Thomas actually fulfills the role of collecting new party members. There is a fifith POV character obtained if you beat the game with all 108 Stars of Destiny collected and it fills in some more backstory to the main conflict but I won't spoil it because it's actually one of the best rewards in the series for doing the whole collectathon. Each of the three main protagonists get about three chapters to complete their story, and you must complete all three characters chapters to finally move onto the the final two chapters of the games conflict. It's interesting how well each of the characters tales intertwine with each other. The game deals with serious topics such as war crimes, cycle of revenge that maintains these types of constant conflicts, the idea of what it means to be a hero for the people, and cultural identity. One of the more detailed plotlines involves the Bug Riders, who were former members of the Grassland Clans before Harmonia took over their territory during the Flame Bringer War fifty years ago. Subjected to Harmonia's caste system, the group is mobilized by Harmonia to attack their former allies in the hopes they can finally be upgraded to second class citizens where they can finally gain some rights. The issue is that some of the older members of the clan still maintain loyalty to their former allies and the hope they will one day be liberated, while the new generation raised in Harmonia can't see themselves being liberated and are simply trying to find an alternate method to better their people. The game delves into complicated issues like that and despite the fantasy elements all around, the game handles most of it's serious topics incredible well. In fact, the game's incredibly strong cast is one of the best things about the game. Thanks to the perspective switch with the POV characters, each character has their own large collection of allies and characters to explore which allows for the player to feel more intimate with the series usual staggering amount of characters. There are also quite a few shout-outs to the previous entries as many recruits are either grown up versions of some of the child characters from previous games such as Tuta the medic, rich bitch Lilly Pendragon of Tinto, and the final conclusion to Futch's story arc which began all the way back in the first game. You even meet some of the kids of characters from previous entries and even the cantankerous Star Dragon Sword makes an appearance although without the wonderful Viktor/Flik duo outside of a name drop. While most entries are pretty self-contained, Suikoden III has enough shout-outs and story depth to make it more rewarding to have played through the previous entries. Sadly, the Save Data feature is a bit of a dud in this entry as it doesn't net you a whole lot like the previous game or Suikoden Tactics. On the gameplay side of things, Suikoden III is much more experimental than the rest of the franchise barring spin-offs. While it still stays true to most of the series formula, the game features a new turn based battle system that fully incorporates a semi-realistic take on 3D battles. What I mean by this is that while characters start in their typical sides, once the battle starts, the characters and enemies will move around the battle field to obtain their objective and the game has friendly fire with the magic system. This introduces some unique tactical depth to the series that is surprisingly lacking for a series about mobilizing armies to win wars, but also brings a lot of contrived annoyances that makes the system pretty divisive among the fanbase. Most fans dislike the friendly fire aspect with magic while others were put off by the new buddy system which took away direct control of half your party. If you can either learn to look past these issues or simply embrace the novelty they bring to generic turn base combat, you'll find that SIII actually has one of the more rewarding battle systems in the series. A bigger blemish on the game is the world map mechanics that make getting anywhere in the game more tedious than usual, especially jarring since the character who can teleport you around shows up incredibly late in this entry.Less controversial is the game's new Skill System where the player can put points into special background skills to improve a characters battle capabilities. There is a wide-breath of skills and each character has their own level of proficiency with them which makes most of the games fighters feel really distinct from each other which helps address a large complaint most people have with the series. With that said, the mechanic is overpowered in the players favor and outside of appearing again in Suikoden Tactics, has largely been gutted or heavily modified in the later installments. Another new feature is the Mount system where certain characters can ride large beast allies and combine their stats for extra power. This also was deemed too powerful and kind of got nerfed in subsequent games.In series tradition, SIII introduces a new Army Battle system in which your army must capture nodes on a map and can garner benefits by having allies in adjacent nodes helping them to attack enemy units. What's really unique about it is that the actual battles are played out in a semi-A.I. battle system similar to the Battle Ogre series where your units are composed of the allies you gain and you choose to either attack, defend, or retreat against enemies and the computer determines what attacks you use. What the game kind of fails to mention is that your characters stats are directly taken from the main game, so having a unit with a character you barely use will often lead to disastrous results whereas an overleveled constant party member can sometimes solo the battle fields if the RNG gods feel generous. This makes using the whole playable cast even more important than previous installments. This is especially crucial when the game throws in Yuber or the actual Harmonian Army to deal with as both are as absolutely terrifying in battle as the series builds them up to be. Suikoden III has an odd place in the series history. Despite being the best selling entry, it's regarded as the middle child of the franchise. It's the third entry in the series but canonically the last entry on the timeline. It was the final game developed by the series creator before he left Konami, but the game drops a few of the legacy myth arcs of the series and instead introduces a whole new collection of myth arcs which were sadly never gone into as all of the later entries sidestepped the issues by being prequels. It's the last entry to really innovate the franchises basic mechanics, but a lot of it got ignored in the fourth entry while the fifth entry borrowed more from Suikoden II. It changes a lot of the series narrative focus such as getting an incredibly late start to the army building side of things and spends more time delving into the social aspects of the conflict. It drops the silent protagonist and the players ability to change their name. So it's kind of divisive, though not in the same "love it/hate it" way you usually see in other franchises. Of anything, most fans are simply sad that a lot of the new plot threads introduced in the game will never see resolution and several of the series myth arcs like are dropped in later installments. Overall, despite it's flaws and being a semi-fugly looking early PS2 JRPG, I honestly feel it's one of the best JRPGs on the system.
I have been considering what to play next.
Suikoden III it is.
Suikoden has always been a series that I've been tempted by. Never taken the plunge but it's always there taunting me... just like my entire unfinished gaming backlog.
I still need to get through suikoden II. I have the third one, but I've never touched it.
I love Suikoden III, and it remains a great game. However, the series' entrance into 3D mechanics was not without its glitches, and from my last replay a couple of years ago, the 3D mechanics (or lack thereof) have not aged well. This includes a clunky, fixed camera and your character sprite "running" at the pace of a 70-year-old grandmother on her second hip-replacement. I've never been so happy to see Viki. After that, my biggest gripe is probably the 999,999 potch limit.
That being said, I still tend to think more highly of S3 than S5, because S3's cast and storytelling are just fantastic. I even began enjoying the battle system, except for that friendly fire bulltrout making the game's True Rune virtually unusable (not that Hugo needs any magic to demolish everything in his path in chapters 4 and 5). My first time through, I thought the game had a very nice range of difficulty and challenge. I liked the concept of the main story boss battles that were optional to win, and Yuber was a nightmare for major battles for my first few encounters. Of course, the skill system for your main party and mounts are easily broken (as is farming Fury runes), but that's not until late game anyway. And I really liked how your characters in major battles were linked to their level/skills/equipment, which rewarded you for putting in the effort of using more people; for the life of me, I'm not sure why that concept was never utilized again.
And then there's one of the best parts of S3: the stupidly hilarious theater mini-game. You can have any of your characters star in plays such as Romeo and Juliet, as well as Suikoden-themed stories from important events in previous games. Some of the characters are great actors and others, well... not so much.
Suikoden III is a great game
I have the first game. Still really need to sit down and get into it.
Suikoden is a game I wish I had played when it first came out because I probably would have liked it better. I still liked the first two (haven't played the third), and the second has one of the best stories.
27.I've been kind of mulling over this one lately. In hindsight, I've talked a lot about FFIV in the last ten or so years, I even wrote an article about it for this forum for the fan magazine project we helped with a few years back. Part of me even considered just copy/pasting the unedited version of that article for this piece. My other thought was that I was doing a retrospective article series a few years back and I kind of stalled on IV because I frankly found myself in a position where I had too much to say, which is why that series of articles went on indefinite hiatus. So once again, I'm here and need to to write about this game and a bit frozen in place on where I should take this entry.Like all of the Final Fantasy entries on this list, I'm not as inclined to really delve into "what is this entry?" like others because I know most of us are familiar with it and I'm sure some members could tell me things I didn't even know. Overall it's a bit redundant so I guess I'll simply settle with a bit of backstory about this game and my relationship with it. One factor I rarely divulge about my gaming habits is that I sometimes associate music or times of the year for certain games or series. Like I usually get in the mood to play DQ in the fall because I had a knack for always playing through the game around that time. For IV, I associate the game with Christmas because I finally beat it a few days before the holiday and so I associate it with the decorations and music cause that was also going on while I was playing. I also associate it with certain cheesy 90s songs as well because I played it in a time frame where I was watching MTV and VH1 pretty religiously. I even picked up a song most people would say I have no business listening to because this song was on heavy rotation at the time of me playing through IV. Anyway, tangent aside, let's discuss my history with this game. I had about three friends in middle school who were heavy RPG players that all kept pushing the genre on me. I resisted for as long as I could but eventually borrowed a copy of Secret of Mana and FFVI from one of my friends.Both games finally opened me up to liking the genre and soon I found myself in this annoying situation where I wanted more but being a broke middle school student without a real job my options were limited for birthday and Christmas shenanigans. I did purchase my friends copy of Secret of Mana but he refused to sell me VI and after a certain incident, wasn't as inclined to let me borrow it. So my first goal was to get my own copy of the game but it was super expensive back then and hard to find. Instead, I found Final Fantasy II (IV) which was my friends who lent me the games, favorite entry. I could afford it with my birthday cash and picked it up. In some ways, I lucked out. My experience with the genre had been the two games he lent me and the Battletech game I used to play on my dad's computer, so turn based combat was still a novel idea for me and I appreciate the fact that every character was unique which kept the game feeling fresh. I often blame my introduction to the genre being these three games for why I generally prefer my party to have unique skills over systems where you get to pick and choose a party of blank slates. It was ultimately what I blame for my backlash against VII's Materia system years later. Even though the game was lobotomized with it's translation, censorship, and Square's attempts to dumb it down for us stupid Yankees; I was able to look past all that and really get a feel for the games story and characters. I think it's a testament to this game how really memorable the cast is despite not having too much of a backstory and not having the same amount of screentime as later RPGs. I mean I love characters like Sahz, Ignis, and Balthier but I spent 50+ hours of getting to know them, but I may still rank someone like Tellah or Cecil over them because while they may not have as much time to be developed as their future descendants, the game sticks to what is important about them which leaves a more lasting impression on them. I don't remember every quip Balthier made in XII, I remember him confessing to Ashe about his past on Phon Coast and his final scenes with his father. I don't really remember much of Sahz's comic relief, I only really remember Chapter 8 and can't remember him doing anything afterwards. I can kind of remember a lot of Ignis' stuff since XV is a bit more fresh in my mind, but again, it's the major character moment that makes him memorable along with his almost always inappropriate catch phrase. So even despite having all this extra time to be developed, it's only the major moments that we remember, which is why IV does work because almost every character has one if not two of these types of moments. From Cecil becoming a Paladin, to Tellah's suicidal casting of Meteo, to Edge having to mercy kill his parents, to the twins noble sacrifice to save the party. IV's plot is amateurish and hilariously bad in places, but it's filled to the brim with strong moments that leave a lasting impression. IV is ultimately a game I've gone back and forth with in terms of why I like it. Basically, I debate with myself whether I love it purely for the nostalgia and how the game can whisk me back to my school days or whether there is something more to it and the game is actually a solid entry that can stand the test of time. Depending on when you ask me, I may give you a different answer. I would currently say that it's the latter, but modern gaming fans can easily lose sight of his accomplishment because the game lacks the bells and whistles the genre has kind of been saddled with over the years with in-depth customization systems, Action-RPG systems or elements in the game, and loads of extra mini-games and character skits to expand the time one spends with the game. In contrast, IV is much simpler and a product of a time when people didn't expect much from the genre, yet it does it's best to be as solid as it possibly can. I think it's a wonder that IV is probably the most balanced game in the series.
FFIV is truly a great entry in the series. Each time I think about it and what I like, it raises a little higher in my list of Final Fantasies. It took years before I realized and could admit to myself that I like FFIV more than I like FFVI, which places it in the top three. Its most prominent appeal is that its both simple and fun to play. There's no time-consuming materia system to swap out and get just right. You don't have to spend an extra twenty hours doing ridiculous side-quests and mini-games for the best stuffs. All you have to do is just sit down and enjoy the adventure..
26.So I have a little bit of a confession to make with this one, while I do love the Metroidvania gameplay setup, I definitely love the -vania part of that title more than the Metroid side. Not because I have anything against Metroid, but truth be told Super Metroid was my first entry in the series and the only one I ever beat. I own the original and Metroid II but acquired them years after the fact and they are trapped in my backlog hell with another 200 games you're probably wondering why they are not on this list. I also just didn't care for the direction Prime took the series and their is enough fan backlash against Other M and most Metroid related products released since then that I haven't really paid much attention to the series. Course with all that said, we're now sitting on entry 26 of this thread and I've got Super Metroid, I guess what I'm saying is that I like Metroid, but I'm certainly just a casual fan of the series.In hindsight, I feel I liked the last two games a bit more than this one but this is still an outstanding game on the SNES and perhaps it's just been too long since I played through it.
Set shortly after the events of Metroid II, where Samus basically went all genocide on the Metroid species, Samus handed over the last surviving member of the species to the government despite the poor thing having a childlike bond to her. Unfortunately, the facility studying the creature is attacked and Samus returns to find the Space Pirates of Zebes she vanquished in the first game have regrouped and are ready to rumble with her again over the last Metroid. The game has the player return to the world of the first game, and you can even revisit the original rooms where Samus defeated Mother Brain. What I find the most striking about the game is it's wonderful atmosphere. If you love the Aliens franchise, the game pulls off a similar vibe as you explore the gloomy planet and facilities while almost everything is there to kill you like. Like most Metrodvania style games, the focus is on exploring the world and acquiring power ups to expand your ability to reach previously unreachable places on the map. It's actually more fun than it sounds as you have to platform and look for better weapon upgrades to prevent you from just becoming a bloody smear on some enemies shoe. I honestly always got excited finally working my way through an area and finding a new one. The "ghost ship" being a particular favorite especially with the semi-50s era inspired robots that wandered about it. There is a real sense of accomplishment when find things like the grapple beam or the screw attack, especially since this genre loves to always shove out of reach stuff in front of your nose, so even backtracking isn't quite the chore you feel it would be as you try out your new abilities to see if you can uncover a secret or reach a new area. While the main enemies are not too difficult to deal with, the bosses in this game are exceptional with several memorable encounters and some real challenges to what you may feel is a tried and true strategy, like using super missiles until you fight Ridley and learn the hard way he can actually catch them and throw them back at you. One of the elements I really liked about the game was some of the outside of the box thinking you can do to win battles. My all time favorite being the battle in the ocean stage against the giant shrimp monster who loves to grab you and rape you. You can blow up some side vents on the walls to break open an electric current. If the boss grabs you, you can use the grappling beam to latch onto the current and roast both of you, but as long as you've been looking around for all those health power-ups, chances are, you'll have more health than the boss and outlast him which is a surprisingly satisfying feeling. The final confrontation is also worth mentioning, and frankly, it might be one of the best conclusions to a Nintendo game I've ever played. It's bittersweet and unexpected with a fun little god mode to play through and I feel it says a lot about the game's writing that so many emotions can be felt in a sequence where no one talks. I don't feel it's hard to see why people often feel Super Metroid is the definitive entry in the series with the exception of the Prime series. Overall, if you're looking for a sweet atmospheric sci fi thriller with an emphasis on exploration and semaless platfmoring and combat, then definitily check this game out.
Super Metroid is a colossus of a game. So atmospheric. I struggled badly playing it though. Never got round to completing it!
25.So now we've reached the final PC exclusive on this list, and also one of the few titles on this list I make a point not to play very often, not because I'm over it, but because I have enough problems staying productive to not add this monstrous title into the mix. For those who live under a rock and don't know what Civilization is, it's a classic Turn based strategy/sim game where you choose a culture and build their society over a few millennium. You can either win the game by world domination or building a space shuttle to send people to Alpha Centauri before anyone else. I usually send the ship and then spend the remaining time playing anti-christ as I see how quickly I can decimate the entire planet with my full nuclear arsenal. Though there have been several sequels and spin-offs of the franchise, I've never really moved past the second installment, partly because of nostalgia, partly because playing the sequels would have involved buying them and installing them on my PC so I'm forever stuck with the temptation of playing it instead of you know... working.I know that sounds funny, but it's a real problem with this series. It may be one of the most addictive games for me on this list.
For me personally, I usually always shoot for getting as many of the Wonders of the Worlds as they are some of my favorite sequences in the game as you get really cool videos when you acquire one. I also adore the advisors which are all hilariously played by some actors who certainly had some fun with this job. Even cooler is how they change from toga wearing Greco-Roman knockoffs to Renaissance Italians, to bad U.S. knockoffs with one French woman. Despite all of this, Luxury plays his role forever as an Elvis knockoff. Thankfully, getting luxury on your side is a simple matter of raising the luxury tax by 10% and the guy will never bother you again. I don't think I've ever seen science mad at me either. Trade on the other hand...
I favored the English, Japanese, Russians and Babylonians in my playthroughs and I swear to god this game remembers stuff because I remember wiping the Aztecs out in one campaign and ever since, I almost always have them as an opponent and they make it a point to try and wipe me out specifically. I guess karma exists in gaming as well. Still I enjoy trying to balance out building functional cities that don't constantly rebel while also building my doomsday army to destroy my enemies. Sadly, I've never succeeded in conquering the world but I have achieved space colonization before everyone else.
While I'm sure the later entries are superior, I still have a soft spot for the entry my dad got me into. Even now, I'm still debating about putting it back on my PC and playing a few rounds.
Next Up: You'll never see it coming...
24.My first of three Persona games on this list, and the most recent addition to the list as well. I've been debating with myself on how to tackle this one because it's so new and I really don't want to spoil too much for people who want to play it. P5 was definitely a critical hit for me as I've played through four fairly solid JRPGs (I am Setsuna, Final Fantasy XV, Bloodborne, and Persona 5) on my PS4 by this point and it was certainly the best contender and leaves me pretty optimistic about the genres revival for me on the new generation hardware, which is nice because I spent most of last gen muttering about how the genre seemed to be slipping away for me. In broad strokes, Persona 5 stars a young man who is forced to move to Tokyo and be under supervision as the last step of his parole. He got involved in an altercation in a domestic violence dispute and unfortunately, one of the party involved was a big shot adult who used his influence to set the guy up as the bad guy in the whole situation. Framed for a crime he didn't really commit, the MC has to now has to live in the attic of a coffee shop with it's eccentric owner and spend one year ins school without getting into trouble. Unfortunately for him, the school quickly discovers his bad rep as a delinquent and it's doesn't take long before your character becomes an outcast as the student body openly gossips about you and teachers are either apathetic to your plight or are actively trying to get rid of you to help keep the school's reputation from plummeting. It doesn't take long to realize the school has some serious corruption problems as teachers abuse their powers and despite the schools squeaky clean reputation on the outside, the place is filled with some dark secrets. The MC soon forms a bond with Ryuji, a fellow outcast with a chip on his shoulder with the schools P.E. Teacher and star employee. While walking to school one day, the MC discovers a strange app on their phone that they can't delete. When using the app, nothing seems to happen but when they try to get to school they find it's been transformed into a castle, and one of the teachers is lording over it as it's king. Completely dumbfounded by what's going on as they run into weird counterparts of their classmates and faculty and the main character awakens to his Persona in order to save his classmate. The pair encounter Morganna, a talking anthropomorphic cat and self-described "Phantom Thief" who is trying to sneak into the castle and steal the treasure of it's king in order to return to his original form. According to Morganna, the pair had somehow gotten access the collective unconscious and can see the world as other people see it, but when a person becomes corrupt in the real world, their desire warps the world around them in this mind world. Stealing their treasure, the item that is the cause of the warping will either kill them, or potentially give them a change of heart that will affect them in the real world.Seeing this mind world and it's correlation with the real world the pair try to fix things in the real world but events get more dramatically serious instead. They soon resolve themselves to help Morganna to steal the teacher's heart instead. From there, the Phantom Thieves begin. There is so much more that goes on here, but again, it's better to experience it for yourself. Persona 5 actually uses a very intriguing narrative device that really sets it apart from other entries in the series as well as delving into most serious topics concerning the abuse of power and social reform. This allows the game to tackle some heavy subject matter such as sex abuse, blackmail, suicide, hikikomori, organized crime, political scandals, and the central conflict on whether it is right to force a person who is doing wrong to do the right thing against their will. This game is easily one of the most politically charged games I've played in a long while and feels like something that as created due to real world issues like the rise in strongman politicians due to an apathetic citizenship. For a game about kids dressing up in silly costumes to go to colorful them parks versions of popular film "thief targets" like banks, tombs and luxury liners; the game is incredibly sharp on exploring these pretty mature themes. Their is a certain heaviness to the game that is not felt much in the genre which is usually fine with masquerading in make believe fluff for a thinly disguised and overused tale of self discovery, but P5 has an honest to goodness message going for it.Gameplay is also fantastic and easily the biggest improvement for the series. This game actually has real dungeons with real puzzles and real layouts instead of the series token copy/paste labyrinth design. They are incredibly fun and each new dungeon always offers some new element to keep them fresh from security cameras, to trip wires, to actually needing to talk to NPCs to gather clues to proceed, the level design is tightly designed and offers both a strong linear path that gradually opens into a more open dungeon design as you unlock paths to previous areas to make traversing the dungeons easier. The dungeon crawling plays up as a very stylized stealth mission as you try to avoid guards attentions and sneak up on them for preemptive strikes. Getting spotted too many times will boost the enemy awareness and aggressiveness levels. If you screw up too many times, you'll get booted from the dungeon and have to return a few days later after the Threat Level goes down. Combat has also been spruced up with several new options such as the ability to negotiate with demons being brought back, firearms have returned, the game adds back two elements from previous entries in Persona/Devil Summoner, critical hit abilities from Nocturne have returned, and the newest addition is the Baton Pass mechanic which brings back a level of depth and strategy to the games that have been missing for awhile. Basically if a party member unlocks this skill through their social links, when an enemy gets knocked down the player gets their second turn, or they can "pass the baton" and give their extra turn to another party member who also has the skill unlocked. This passed turn also gets a bonus to damage or healing and you can actually stack Baton Passes opening up the potential for some serious damage against enemies and bosses. Boss battles also have certain gimmicks to them that keep them feeling fresh, though if I have one gripe, they also can make some of the battles easier than they should be. They're still fun to do though and in the end, that's all that matters.The social side of things has also seen a few changes. One of the biggest changes is that since the game focuses on social outcasts and your character being a delinquent, you don't do the typical stuff like you would in previous titles. For instance, your school activities are restricted to just hanging out with your teammates, don't expect to be joining track team or the art club here, your character is not a model student in any way and instead you get to do things like help a washed up politician preach on the streets, go to the red light district to chat with a gonzo journalist about the Phantom Thieves, help run a plastic model gun shop that is a front for certain criminal interests and more. Your social link (now called confidants) are all people like the MC, delinquents and people who live on the fringe of society or social norms. In past titles, it has always been joked that the MC simply sees they're social links as a means to get stronger, P5 plays this incredibly straight as your social links are less about helping some poor souls struggling and instead finding assets who can help your crime spree. This is shown by how all of the social links garner bonuses for raising their ranks, something played with in P4 but brought to full fruition in P5. Even your party members will give you special bonuses aside from some cool upgrades like follow up attacks and Baton Pass, such as Yusuke fulfilling a role similar to the demon painter in P2, or the characters giving you a second chance with a negotiation that goes south. This ends up really changing the dynamic of how you approach the social links as some characters give off better bonuses than others like the one that boosts your XP or the one that helps maximize your social links faster. Two of them even give you new abilities in battle that help add even more options and tactics to your disposal. In addition to all that is the usual time wasters as well you can use to boost social stats or even major stats like HP/MP such as eating at certain places, watching movies, the battling cages, physical training, and making thief tools to use in dungeons.I could keep going on and on about this game, but I'll leave it here. Despite being ranked 24 on this list, I imagine it will continue to climb this ladder as times goes on. I can honestly see it actually becoming my favorite entry in the franchise with a few more playthroughs. In truth, I really needed this game. After several years of being jerked around and often disappointed by series, this game came as a reminder that sometimes it's not just empty promises. With the success and serious whoring out of P3 and especially P4 by Atlus, I was afraid the company was going down the same path as Square after FFVII and I would be stuck seeing Yu Narakami being painfully placed into everything for fan service cause he's from the big hit entry. I was worried the guys would just rest on their laurels cause I've seen too many companies do this after they get a smash hit. I was also worried because it had been eight years since the last entry and instead the company had been focusing on gimmicky spin-offs and ports that I worried this game wasn't going to hold up, especially when we've kind of been inundated with games with ridiculous development times that underwhelmed. Overall, the last ten years of the game industry has made me very cynical to the industry and the idea that everyone was the same, so it was a serious boon to find that not only did P5 stand out as a great game, but offered an uncompromising and intellectually stimulating story and message that keeps you thinking long after you see the games ending. This game pretty much represents everything I feel has been missing from the JRPG genre for nearly a decade. My one regret is the idea that we'll probably not see another game of it's caliber this generation, but this game has given me renewed hope that maybe I should lighten up and stop being so cynical about the industry as I have been. As I said, I played three pretty strong JRPGs before this one so perhaps the future will see my favorite genre turn around and become a powerhouse again.
Coming up next: Here Comes a New Challenger!
I can't comment on Persona 5. But I definitely played a bunch of Civ II-IV. Civ IV, to me, is the most solid all-around game of those three (albeit also the one I've played most recently), but they're all addicting time-sinks.
I finally as of today beat Persona 5. I do like a lot of what it did, but it's definitely the kind of game I can't play all the time. The persona games take up a ton of time and have some poor pacing that has me getting bored and ready to play something else relatively frequently. Despite all of that, I really enjoy the series, and this rpg has helped keep the genre alive for me in the current generation.
Well, I guess I saw that coming!
23.So we've now come ton one of my favorite fighting games of all time, one of the more underrated spin-off series of the Street Fighter franchise besides Pocket Fighter, and a series that is filled with some awesome call backs to the first Street Fighter and Final Fight Series. While most of the images come from SFA3, which is my favorite version from a gameplay standpoint, I'll likely be talking about the series in general terms though I'm probably not going to bore you with the features from the Anthology version which mixed in some elements from SFIII. Street Fighter Alpha (Zero in Japan) takes place between the original SF and SFII, and it was heavily influenced by the Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie which is easily the best SF movie in terms of having a decent plot, respect for the source material, and actually giving characters not named Ryu some time to actually shine. Stages in this series are based on places from the film like the grassy field in a lightning storm where Ryu fought Sagat in the film's opening as well as M. Bison's Shadowloo Jet that he battled Ken Masters. You could even unlock a mode where you could double team M.Bison with Ryu and Ken just like the film. This feature ended up getting extended in later versions with more freedom to use different team combinations. What's really cool is that the game's roster is filled with upgrades on forgotten fighters from SF like Adon, Birdie, and my main man Gen but also brought in a slew of characters from the Final Fight series like Cody, Guy, and bosses Sodom and Rolento; which was a huge shout out for a guy who grew up in the arcade scene and knew that series pretty well. Shame Hagar never made his fighting game debut until MvC3. Yet it's not just people from the three core games of SF1, SF2 and Final Fight, new original characters were also introduced such as the iconic Dan Hibiki and Sakura, as well as anti-Shoto scrub Rose and haughty Sakura rival Karin. Hell the game expanded Cammy's backstory and gave her her own collection of clones to make shoto-clone players like myself feel a bit happier. SFA2 had a really solid roster but then SFA3 and SFA3Max decided to throw players a bone and release the whole cast of Super Street Fight II into the mix to add a tone of variety and even a few new people in the PSP version. Overall, I feel the new characters and the redo of older and forgotten characters worked really well for this game especially in comparison to new characters added in games like SFIV and V who just don't stand out to me as well as the quirky cast of SFAlpha. Course the fun character intros and gorgeous 2D artwork probably helps.In terms of gameplay, SFAlpha introduces a lot of features to the franchise. The game basically works off the DarkStalkers engine and gameplay style but got modified as the series went along. Air Blocks, Alpha counters, chain combos, and three levels of super gauge added a lot of depth to the tried and true SF Formula. The sequel added custom combos and the final game added the ability to choose an -iISM for the character which modified their super gauge options and even their character stats but offered a tone of replayability. With -ISM, you could do X-ISM which gave your character better attack power at the cost of lower defense and being restricted to one predetermined super move with only one bar creating a high risk high reward set-up. A-ISM was balanced and similar to previous titles normal play as you got three supers which cost different bar health and the character had balanced stats. V-ISM lowered a characters attack in exchange for higher defense and the super moves are removed and exchanged for custom combos from the second installment. The third entry also introduced a World Tour mode where you would have to perform challenges like beating an opponent with a 10-hit V-ISM custom combo or only use throws. What's really interesting about this mode is that it had RPG elements where beating challenges would reward special bonuses that could be equipped to your character to give them new advantages and customize their play style even further, you could even transfer this character into arcade or versus mode if you wanted. Beating World Tour mode under certain restrictions gave you the chance to fight and unlock Evil Ryu and then going through it again with Evil Ryu and completing the same requirement got you a chance to face and unlock Shin Akuma. Between those two and Boss Mode M. Bison in this game, SF Alpha has some of the most challenging bosses in the series that don't completely rely on cheap tactics like some other bosses I can think of. In many ways, SFAlpha represents my favorite era of Capcom's fighters as series like Darkstalkers, Pocket Fighter, and the early iterations of the Capcom Vs franchises were dominating the arcade scene and for a guy who grew up on the SF franchise, it was a sweet dream. The games all offered enough new elements and changes that I was never able to be bewitched and move onto 3D Fighters like Tekken or Soul Calibur which were starting to make most gamers move away from Capcom and SNK's more frenetic and gorgeously animated 2D fighters. Behind SFIITurbo, this is the series I played the most of in my fighting retinue and while I had some stints with Guilty Gear and SFIII, neither could really pull me away from my favorite iteration of one of my favorite fighting game series.
Coming up next: A NEW GENERATION OF ROBOTS WHICH CONTAIN AN INNOVATIVE NEW FEATURE - THE ABILITY TO THINK, FEEL AND MAKE THEIR OWN DECISIONS...
Man, of course you'd like Gen. He's also one of my favorite characters!
22.
The Capcom love continues. Mega Man X is a wonderful example of how to revamp an old formula while not throwing out everything people liked. Truth be told, I love the MMX series more than the main series overall if I was simply comparing the whole franchises to each other. I've only ever beaten three MM entries legitimately whereas X3 and the two X-Treme entries are the only MMX games I have not completed. It's a damn solid series overall and brought a lot of fresh ideas and a change of setting to make it stand apart from the other spin-offs and sequels in the Mega Man franchise.
Set a century or two after the final events of Mega Man, whenever that was going to be, an archeologist named Dr. Cain uncovers an old lab belonging to the famous Dr. Light which contains Dr. Lights final magnum opus, X. X is the first robot built with free will, but fearing the possibility X could turn evil, Dr. Light had him sealed away and tested internally to make sure that X was endowed with a strong moral code that would prevent him from starting a robot uprising. He passed of course cause Dr. Light couldn't build an evil robot if his life depended on it. X's advancements were so great that Dr. Cain, foolishly reverse engineered his design to build a new series of sentient robots called Reploids with the help of X. Unfortunately, Dr. Cain failed to understand why Dr. Light had X sealed away and it didn't take long before Reploids starting rebelling against humanity. These rogue Reploids called Mavericks, saw the rise in the Maverick Hunters, a special Reploid Police force that neutralized Mavericks for the sake of humanity and non-Maverick Reploids. They were led by Sigma, Dr. Cain's most advanced creation and a very powerful and charismatic figure in the world. Then the worse case scenario happened, Sigma decided that the Mavericks had it right all along, humanity was not worth saving and had simply been holding back the Reploids as a subservient species. Declaring a revolution, Sigma defected from the Maverick Hunters along with several of his loyal comrades and formed an army to destroy humanity and us=her in a new age for machines. Feeling partly responsible for the rebellion, X volunteers to help Zero, the new leader of the MH, to stop Sigma, but can an "inferior" robot from the distant past stand a chance against this new menace?... Well yes, cause Dr. Light was a genius and the series pretty much establishes pretty quickly that despite being the oldest robot in the series, X is the most advanced.
Core gameplay remains the same with X having to choose to battle eight Maverick Leaders before getting a shot at the big bosses stronghold. New to the formula is the introduction of a prologue stage used to teach the player several of the new mechanics this series introduces. If you want a real cool breakdown of how well thought out the level design for this stage was, you should check out Egoraptor's Sequelitis entry on MMX. One of the biggest new features for the game is X's ability to now cling and slowly slide down walls which he can also kickoff of to reach higher elevation. This not only limits the frustration of of instant kill pits the series is notorious for, but it also allows the designers to expand the level design to incorporate this feature as you may find your self in a dead end only to discover you either needed to climb some walls to reach the next area or more subversively, that bottomless pit you passed two screens ago is actually an entrance way. X also doesn't begin the game with full health anymore, instead the series incorporate a Super Metroid mechanic where you need to find life containers to effectively increase X's life bar to full, which is a actually a pretty interesting design because it makes the early sections much more challenging than they normally would be, which is nice because X is also a bit better about designing the bosses in such a way that you can beat them with your normal weapon if you're skilled enough. No more Crash Man incidents where trying to fight him without the weapon he's weak to or four E-Tanks is a death wish. That is not to say the game isn't challenging, the game drops the one time E-Tanks for four permanent ones that simply need to be refilled if you use them which makes going after power-ups even after getting full health more useful. One of the most iconic changes is the introduction of X's Advanced Armor. Scattered through the levels are old capsule pods with an A.I. Dr. Light Hologram ho has sealed away various armor pieces for X to help given him some improvements to help fight the badguys. The actual main armor piece halves damage, the boots give you the dash move which replaces Mega Man's slide move from the main games, the gun gives you a third tier charged shot and the ability to charge sub-weapons, and the helmet... well it kind of sucks in this game but later installments give it some oomph.
Combining these elements with MMX retaining the modern (at it's time of release) ability from the MM series to go back to levels to pick up items you missed ends up giving this game a pretty open structure for advancing. There are upgrades you may not be able to reach until you find a certain other upgrade first, so the game kind of has an odd metroidvania feel to it despite having typical tight level design. One of the coolest features I loved in MMX and I am still flabbergasted as to why it never became a standard feature for the series is that defeating certain bosses before you should, can sometimes lead to major changes in another bosses stage. This is because the game makes it a point to say that the stages are interconnected as part of Siga's war machine which I thought was a cool way to tie in a neat gameplay feature to the story. So the one most people will see first is that by beating Chill Penguins stage first, it will lead to Flame Mammoth's stage being frozen over and thus you can avoid a lot of instant kill lava and frustration this way. It also gives you access to places you normally couldn't reach due to elemental hazards. Several stages have some interesting effects like this and it only adds to the game's interesting replay value of the stages to find the power-ups. The game also brought in the series trademark secret. In the first game, by fulfilling some requirement you can unlock the ability to let X use Ryu's Hadoken move from Street Fighter by actually performing the Hadoken move. This move was even an instant kill move though it can't be performed in the air. Another feature I love that was sadly phased out as the series went along was the introduction of power armors you could pilot in stages, which were similar to vehicles you could pilot in games like Contra or Metal Slug.
Structurally, X was a real cool advancement on the Mega Man formula which was growing pretty stale at the time. Course the thing that kept me coming back to the series, and a lot of others as well was the game's more mature story. MMX is not the light-hearted Astro Boy knockoff that is the main Mega Man series which was always kind of tongue in cheek about the Blue Bombers relationship with Wily. It's a pretty grim series that only got darker and more desperate as the series progressed as you should all know after reading the MMX4 entry on this list, but it all started here. The intro stage has you battle it out with a ruthless ex-Maverick Hunter named Vile who totally thrashes you and you have to be saved by Zero. In the first stage of Sigma's fortress you infiltrate it with Zero who goes on ahead but he ends being taken down by Vile as well and you now get to rescue him but even with all your upgrades the battle is still against you and the whole sequence gets resolved with a heroic sacrifice on Zero's part and X, in a moment of righteous rage, laying the smackdown on Vile and this sequences was awesome. Even Sigma's battle is interesting as he mocks you ancient hardware and waxes on about the superiority of Reploids over humanity. Unlike Saturday Morning cartoon villain Wily, Sigma comes across like Magneto, though in the early years where he was still very much a bad guy, and so you kind of can't fault him for his beliefs and his idea that what he's doing is right for Reploids, something that becomes more poignant as the series went on and especially cuts you to the core when you reach MMZero series and Sigma's worst fears come true. Despite how little story there is within the game, MMX presents itself as a darker interpretation of the MM franchise and borrows a bit from anime and Terminator 2 to present a more complex scenario where the villains may not be real villains and your own actions are debatable. A lot of this is poignantly made by the fact that X himself is described as pacifistic, and his adventures through the series begin to take a serious toil on him consciously and this works better with this moral grey area the game's scenario presents.
Overall, MMX is one of the highlights of the SNES and the beginning of one of my favorite franchises from Capcom. While only two entries made it onto this list, I honestly love most of the series with the exception of X7. Hell Command Missions is a super underrated JRPG for the PS2 and X8 was surprisingly good for a game made after the franchise killing X7. So if you want a cool action platform game series with some great characters, good level design, catchy music, and fun gameplay, I would recommend not only MMX, but the whole series.
Coming Up next: The dreams I've abandoned couldn't have come true, I have other dreams I haven't given up on. They still shine bright, they still light my way...
Oh look its Rockman
21.Now for my all time favorite Rhythm Game. A game that combines interesting and challenging gameplay with quirky Japanese sensibilities, and of course a rocking soundtrack. While I had heard of the game before through gaming mags, it wasn't until I saw someone playing a demo of it at an EB Games that I decided I was interested enough to check it out. After EB and Gamestop merged and they put up for sale a crap tone of rare games for some of their systems at a few locations, I was able to get my hands on it and it's been one of the coolest purchases I've made. Gitaroo Man is the story of U-1 this is a visual pun that the translators totally missed because his name would be pronounced Yuichi in Japanese which is a fairly common name over there, in the English version it's pronounced as you would expect. a klutzy and hapless kid who has a mad crush on a girl in his school but can't stand out to the snobby rich kid that occupies her time. U-1 takes advice from his talking dog Puma to learn guitar while also revealing that U-1 and Puma are actually aliens from the Planet Gitaroo and in possession of the last Gitaroo an artifact the evil Gravellion Prince Zowie is trying to acquire in order to combine it with the six he already own to gain ultimate power and conquer the universe. He sends assassins to battle U-1 for his Gitaroo but when he wields the Gitaroo, he transforms into the more confidant Gitaroo and battles them out in epic music duels which jump from rock, to reggae, to J-Pop, and classic guitar. Eventually U-1 is transported to his home world and battles Zowie for control of the universe. So yeah it's pretty weird and Japanese, especially the fun characters sent to take you down like a disco afro guy in a giant bee costume, a UFO who uses Dance Until You Die Rays on people, an operatic rock god, and some animated xylophone playing skeletons. Gameplay is a bit harder to explain, the game is actually a series of musical duels a la dueling banjo style where you have to counter your opponents style. Battles have three stages interspersed with Attack and Guard Phases. Attack Phase has the player follow a track line with the analog stick while hitting the play button to sync with the tracks on the line. In Guard Phase, various button prompts based on the four main buttons of the controller move towards the center and you have to time the presses as they hit the center to avoid damage. In the first Stage, known as Charge Stage, you have to correctly sync your guitar to the track line in order to fill up your health bar which always starts very low and hopefully move it to full before the second stage, battle mode presumes. Battle Stage is pretty straightforward as you alternate between Attack and Guard phases trying to whittle down your opponents health while avoiding your enemies attempts to do the same. The music actually has a lot of variation in the middle section and it's really difficult to hear every variation this middle section has. Depending on who is able to get the enemy into critical mode first, you jump to the final End phase if you win the tug of war in which you play a final piece to finish off the opponent with a bang.The gameplay is surprisingly challenging, but very rewarding, with great stages and tracks interspersed with a pretty comical and nonsensical story-line about the power of believing in yourself, destiny, the power of music, and just plain weirdness. If you wanted to play a game that made you feel like a guitar god but never wanted to shelve out the extra cash for Guitar Hero and it's other contemporaries, or spend the time actually learning guitar; this is the game for you. This is a game I used to play a lot around family and I ended up getting pretty good with some stages because certain family members liked the music and asked me to play those stages repeatably. There is a Master Mode you can unlock by beating the game which is pretty difficult. Getting high scores also allow you to unlock entries in the character bio sections so you can learn more about the game's wacky cast of eccentrics. There is a also a two-player versus mode, but I've never had anyone to play it with me. The game also got a slightly enhanced port for the PSP but like the original, there were not a whole lot of copies and it became obscure pretty quick, though I think it may have finally been released on PSN.
It's a quirky and fun musical game with an interesting gameplay set-up and some awesome music, and it's hard for me to find some kind of fault in it. If you ever get a chance and want to check out a Rhythm Game that doesn't require some odd peripheral or physicality, this is a great game to start. My one regret is that I can't find a copy of the soundtrack.
Coming Up: "Shadow and light are two sides of the same coin… One cannot exist without the other."
Mega Man X is a great game, and your list is making me nostalgic to play some Mega Man. Of course, the MMX series always reminds me of Tycho's strange ignorance of its entire existence.
GitarooMan looks great and I can't believe I've never heard of it and I really need to try it now or I'll die
Very impressive that a recent game like P5 cracks your top 25. I really need to play that one.
20.Nintendo is a company that I grew up with, and while I feel I've either outgrown or have simply lost interest in many of the games they produce, the one series that has always kept me coming back to them is the Zelda franchise. I love this franchise and even in the times I didn't own a Nintendo system to play them, I always kept tabs on Nintendo's newest iterations. Even, now, I may end up picking up a Wii U just because of all of the Zelda love the console got with the two HD Remasters and Breath of the Wild. As it stands, This is easily my favorite 3D entry in the series.Set several centuries after the events of Majora's Mask in the Childhood Timeline, Link is a ranch hand who lives outside of the village or Ordon. He is well liked by the adults for his dependability, looked up to by the village children who are always up to something to alleviate the boredom of simple country living, and has caught the eye of the mayor's daughter who takes care of Epona. Link was getting ready to help with a traditional tribute to the Hyrule royalty when the village is attacked by Bulbins who proceed to kidnap the children and the mayor's daughter. With the town warrior injured in the attack, Link takes what weapons he can to go after the kids, but his journey is cut short when the world around him is twisted into twilight and Link is transformed into a wolf and imprisoned by Shadow creatures. Waking up in Hyrule Castle, Link meets a strange and mischievous imp called Midna who promises to help Link escape if he'll help her complete a certain task, with no choice the two join forces and meet with Princess Zelda, imprisoned in the castle who explains that Hyrule has been invaded by a wicked sorcerer from the Twilight Realm known as Zant. Turning out to be a common foe with Midna, Link and her restore his form and the parts of Hyrule engulfed by the Twilight Realm as they seek the pieces of the Fused Shadow, an ancient and powerful artifact that was created by the Twilight Realm to conquer it. Of course the game falls into typical Zelda shenanigans and a certain badass ginger with a penchant for pigs turns out to be behind everything but I digress, the story of Twilight Princess is actually one of my favorites. Gameplay is typical of the series, specifically Ocarina of Time but with several of the technical fixes brought in by Wind Waker like a refined Z-Targeting and more advanced sword play options. Where this might get interesting for some of you is that the version I own and have the most familiarity with is the Wii version which "flipped" the world to accommodate the usually left handed Link for righties like myself. This also means I played with the ham-fisted tacked on motion controls, but I'm here to say that I feel the complaints against them are largely over-exaggerated and because Nintendo wisely chose a No More Heroes "less is more" approach to the controls, I honestly feel they work really well with the game. In fact, I feel TP gave me what I wanted with motion controls far more than Skyward Sword which I felt hurt itself overall by making them too much of a focus for the game. It was actually hard for me to jump back to some of the older 3D Zelda games where I had to wrestle with analog sticks and shoulder buttons to use the hookshot and bow after playing the smoother interface of point and click. The fishing mini-game was a hoot as well thanks to the physicality of the controls. Of anything, I feel only the advanced sword skills really suffered from the Wii's sometimes spotty controls, but since there are only like three enemies that require you to know those skills to beat, it wasn't really all that much of a deal breaker. Moving back to core design, I feel this game's biggest strength may actually be it's dungeon and boss designs. When I honestly think about my favorite dungeons in the series, I find myself picking a majority of them from this game. Even incredibly gimmicky dungeons like the Arbiter's Tomb, the Yeti Mansion, and the Temple of Time are simply just fantastically done and make good use of their respective tools that you almost wish the game did a better job incorporating those tools in later places. I love how the Goron Mines changes the way you approach the Iron Boots with the magnets and sumo wrestling, I love the story element of finding ingredients for pumpkin soup for the yeti in his mansion, I enjoyed going all Spider-man in the Sky Fortress with double hookshots cause hell yeah. The bosses are also incredibly fun even if they suffer from the usual Zelda issue of being trivial once you figure out how to use the dungeon item on them. Still, the devs were trying to be novel like the boss of the Goron mines where you used the Bow to blind him but then had to grab the chains around his legs and wrap them around while using the iron boots to keep you place to force him to fall so you can finally reach his weak point. I mean damn, that's pretty intricate for a boss. Also, if you're going to steal boss fighting concepts from other games, Shadow of the Colossus is not a bad choice to be stealing notes from, and I loved the larger than life bosses you had to literally hook onto to as they took you for a ride like the bosses of the water temple and sky fortress. The other element I love about this game is honestly some of the more cinematic elements with the gameplay. Jousting with King Bublin on the broken Hyrule bridges, the wonderful spaghetti western segment in Impa's secret home, and of course storming Hyrule Castle in the game's ending, which is still my favorite final dungeon in the series. Course it's hard not to talk about TP and not bring up Midna, who is easily one of the best characters to come out of the Zelda franchise. What I feel works best about her is how different she is with Link which makes their relationship stand out more than lazy comic relief Linebeck, nagging Fi and Navi, or serious King Hyrule. She's fun in a mischievous way and her character growth throughout the game is really well done, in fact, it's probably safe to say that TP is more her story than Link's but I feel this is actually a good way to do it since Link easily fits into the Mad Max type role in the series. I must also commend this game for handling Ganondorf, who becomes such a major badass in this title that he became legitimately scary to go up against. I love the scene of his botched execution and the fact he uses the same sword as his own.Overall, I feel Nintendo hit it out of the park with this one, despite the devs not feeling the same way. While the game does have it's fair share of story issues (how did Ganondorf get the Triforce of Power again?) and some less stellar gameplay points (an escort mission on horseback?! Didn't you learn your lesson in Majora's Mask?) I feel the game is actually pretty solid and what few gripes I can really nail it with are either things past games have been doing for awhile or more often than not, Skyward Sword did it worst. It's still one of my favorite Zelda titles and easily my favorite Wii title despite originally being for the Gamecube.
Coming up: Hey get over here! HEY! I said get over... no put the damn bird down. You know what, you guys can have her.
19. This was the game that was meant to come on earlier until I came to my senses, and decided to replay it real quick to remind myself why it was so special. The game that put Team Ico on the map and one of the best arguments for "Game as Art" arguments. Ico is a minimalist experience that takes one of the most dreaded gameplay ideas, the escort mission, and builds a powerful title around it. Ico begins with the main character, a boy born with horns, being transported to a mysterious and mostly abandoned castle by some men who chain him in a jar and leave him there to die as some kind of sacrifice or punishment. The boy is able to escape and comes across a mysterious girl named Yorda in a bird cage, and he frees her so they can escape the castle together. Yorda is weak and can't really move around like the boy but she has a mysterious power to open special doors the boy can't get past. As they search for an exit, mysterious shadow creatures appear and try to kidnap Yorda and the boy must protect her from them and their evil Queen who has an intimate connection to Yorda.The gameplay is a puzzle platformer where you must have the boy figure out a way to transport Yorda from point A to point B in the castle as you both make your way to the exit. The puzzles are often not noticeable and are well disguised as simple natural barriers. At certain points in the game or if the boy stays too long away from Yorda, Shadow creatures appear and will kidnap the girl, forcing you to fight them off. They can't kill you unless they knock you off a high ledge but failing to rescue Yorda also spells your demise. Controls are incredible simple as you fight with one weapon hold Yorda's hand to guide her, use another jump and climb, and you can call Yorda to places or to make jumps for your character. It's not terrible complicated, though I will say the controls are a bit rough around the edges in terms of platform controls compared to say Mario or other dedicated platform dynasties in gaming. What is really striking about the game is the minimalist design around it and the natural environments style of the puzzles. Sometimes the biggest challenge is just trying to figure out what you need to do as you waltz into a what looks like a fairly normal room with no obvious way to reach the door on the other side of the chasm. This organic puzzle solving element of the game is both a real sense of accomplishment and frustration, depending on how well you critical think and process the information the game does give you. On the other hand,. it can be frustrating, especially on a first playthrough and some platform sequences can be filled with red herrings as the level layout can be filled with climbable ledges but only one that will not lead you to certain death. If you're playing any version other than the original North American version for the PS2, you will be grateful to know that Yorda's A.I. is vastly improved and she's even been programmed to give you hints to what you need to do sometimes. Of course it's the minimalist design I adore the most. The game cuts away extraneous elements to make a gripping story and fun gameplay. The game is fundamentally simple but powerful none the less and I feel it's a cleansing experience to play something that reduces the player expectations of empowerment and Hollywood spectacle to play something so unapologetic and just presents the core of why we game. To be enchanted by a fictional world and it's characters, to conquer a great challenge, and to have fun exploring and playing in a digital playground. It doesn't have to be all super powers, love stories, and explosions. This game represents games in it's truest and purest form without the excess that other game companies have overindulged us on.
Team Ico understood that the basis of human understanding is not language, which differs among cultures and despite our best efforts to bypass cultural and social boundaries, still leaves us with some level of misunderstanding. No it's body language that is the universal language and that's what Ico is all about. You can't understand Yorda, hell without the subtitles, you wouldn't be able to understand anyone, but the real message is conveyed by the boy waving to Yorda to come to her, Yorda gasping and running to Ico when he stumbles from a fall or gets knocked down by an enemy. The game saves by having the two simply resting on stone couches of which Ico has to gesture with his hand to make her understand what he wants. I really love this element of the game and how you do watch the two subtly grow closer together as you the player o as well. While several games have used body language to convey messages before in game, Ico is one of the rare few that makes it the only form of real communication, and I think that's special. Hell the game's "story" if you wish to call it is told only through actions and is filled with mysteries that it doesn't bother to answer but leave to the player. Are the shadows the spirits of other horned boys that have been sacrificed? Who is the queen and how did she acquire Yorda for her plan? Is the castle her home or a container for the shadows? Why was Ico born with horns and what is there real connection to the shadow queen? Who made the special swords that have Yorda's power? None of this gets answered and Fumito has said there is no canon answer, it's up to us the player to decide and that's some pretty powerful stuff to be coming out of a medium that sometimes unadvisedly spends too much time trying to overload the player with information relevant to their worlds and characters. This is a large part of what I love about the game is that I often feel your enjoyment is based on what you bring to it. The story is as compelling or boring as the limits of your imagination and the puzzles are clever and really fill you with a sense of accomplishment once you solve them. I love a game that makes the player get more involved in both the story and gameplay. This is an art game, and one I feel most gamers owe it to themselves to play through it at least once. Even if you don't wind up liking it, I feel like it's the type of game that everyone can take something from it.For me, it's the game that makes me believe in gaming as an art form and reminds me why I spend so much time thinking about games to begin with.
Coming Up: What is a man? A miserable pile of secrets!
Ico is so good.
Great to see Twilight Princess get some much deserved love!
And I still need to get to Ico one day
I hated Ico so much xD
18.Oh man, we've come to my first love of the Castlevania franchise. While I've dabbled with the series before this one, SotN is the game that really converted me to the franchise and the Metroidvania style of gameplay the series adapted over time. It also established Richter as my favorite Belmont and like a lot of game franchises transitioning from the 16-bit era to this new one, Castlevania toys with transforming a traditionally evil villain into a more sympathetic character. The game opens in 1792 with the end sequence of Rondo of Blood, now altered to reflect the more literary gothic take on the franchise as we watch Richter and Dracula battle it out both ideologically and physically. With Dracula slain and Richter proclaimed as the strongest Belmont to ever live, Castlevania disappeared for it's hundred year sleep. Except it doesn't, the castle reemerges only four years later and Richter is nowhere to be seen. Dracula's estranged son Alucard, wakes from his sleep 300 year nap since Castlevania III and discovers the castle has reappeared earlier than expected. He storms the castle to face the lord of the manor but is intercepted and stripped of his powerful gear and powers by Dracula's servant Death. Alucard slowly traverses the castle and meets with several employees of his father and even a teenage Maria from Rondo of Blood. The truth about the castles reappearance and the past Alucard soon overtake Alucard's simple battle with his father and has more to do with the events from four years ago that one might imagine.There is a bit more to the story but I won't spoil it. Of anything, I feel it's one of the major testaments to the game is that it incorporates more of a plot and several other RPG elements that made this game standout. Unlike the Belmont clan, who are stuck with a whip and the various sub-weapons, Alucard can equip various pieces of armor and weapons he either finds, takes from enemies, or purchases from the Librarian. The weapons offer several different variations of playstyle which helps to break up the usual monotony these types of games would induce. Other new features is how Alucard's basic vampire transformations are utilized to expand the scope of your exploration. Small passages that mist is need or massive chasms where turning into a bat would be more useful. Another new and unique feature for Alucard is the familiar system, where Alucard can summon a companion to help in battle. The Fairy will use items on Alucard to restore his status, the bat will fire fireballs, the demon imp can hit switches, the floating skull will use sol suck on enemies to hurt them and restore some of Alucard's health, and the sentient sword murders everything. It's a neat mechanic used to help get deeper into the castle while also adding more variety to Alucard's arsenal. Of anything, I think the reason why this game stands out more than it's successors is simply the sheer variety of content the game hands you. It was years after I beat the game I even learned about the Shield Rods special ability which adds a whole new layer of depth to the game and changes how you look at the various shields you can collect. The game is filled with secrets, the most infamous being the reverse castle. If you lay the game straight through with minimal exploration and not really using all the tools handed to you including the one that feel useless, you'll get the game's bad ending where you destroy the castle but are left with a tone of questions. By utilizing a specific item in the final boss fight, you can uncover the real culprit of the plot and open a way to a reverse castle that is the second half of the game with more bosses and gear and the contractually obligated showdown with Dracula. It was pretty mind blowing in 1997, and I'm both happy and sad that the later spiritual successors were smart enough not to steal the idea, but a little sad that many of them fail to hit you with such a cool secret as that one. Other features I love is the secret modes, not only can you unlock a badass version of Richter to play through the game with that will make you wish he was this mobile and versatile in Rondo of Blood but you can even get joke characters like the Axe Armor and there is a mode that starts you off with ridiculously low stats with the exception of an extremely high luck stat that makes the monster drop rate manageable. These modes offer new challenges and more longevity to a game that is honestly just staggering. Super Metroid may have advanced the formula, but I feel SotN set the gold standard of what to expect, and while it's successors are still fun romps in their own right, none of them really hit that level of depth in both story and gameplay that I felt this game does. I think the other reason why this game is so close to my heart is that it's the closest thing to a good Vampire Hunter D title that I'll ever play unless the franchise somehow becomes super popular in Japan again and an actual good company makes a game for it. I own the PS1 title, and combining swordplay action with clunky tank controls is a bad mix, Onimusha notwithstanding. Anyone familiar with the films, or better yet, the novels will see how much they heavily influenced Igarashi's take on the franchise and I am not complaining because I'm a big fan of the franchise and wish we could see more. Overall, Symphony of the Night is easily one of my top ten favorite games for the PlayStation and easily my favorite entries in the Castlevania series. I'm looking forward to see if Bloodstained will measure up, but I may spend more time catching up on a few more of the Igarashi era titles in the meantime.
Coming up: In my restless dreams, I see that town...
Symphony of the Night is so good. I’ve been itching to play it again. I’m hoping Bloodstained can be of similar quality whenever it comes out.
I miss those days of Konami. Castlevania, silent hill, and metal gear are some of my favorite series.
SotN is fantastic. Hard for me to determine whether that or Super Metroid is best in that category.
I feel like the setting of castlevania will make it the more fun game for me, but I am going to be playing super Metroid for the first time soon. I’d really like to play more stuff in the metroidvania style.
WHAT IS A MAN ? A MISERABLE PILE OF SECRETS.
Why are we friends?! :stare:Quote:
Originally Posted by Pumpkin
Man, I've missed some good ones! I need to catch up with this now...
17.While this list has had very few survival horror titles on it, I'm happy such a gem of a game ended up staying with me for so long after I finished it, which is how I feel a real good game should be. SH2 is the only Silent Hill I've finished, not that I dislike the others, I just haven't had the time to really delve into the other entries like I was able to with this game. Overall, this might be the oddest title to make it to this list and reach so far, but I'm getting ahead of myself.Silent Hill 2 is the story of James Sunderland, a grief-stricken widower still mourning the death of his wife Mary from a terminal illness two years ago. His world is turned upside down when he receives a letter from her in the mail that was sent recently, telling him to meet her at Silent Hill where they spent their honeymoon. Emotionally distraught and with nothing else to live for, James comes to Silent Hill which is overrun with a mysterious fog, the townsfolk have mostly disappeared except for a few weirdos, and the town is infested with horrible flesh monsters from your worst nightmares, including a violent and grim stalker called Pyramid Head. James encounters several people including: Angela, a broken girl looking for her mother; Eddie, a deranged and self conscious man; Laura, a bratty little girl with a connection to Mary; and Maria, a local stripper who bears a striking resemblance to Mary. James journey through Silent Hill to discover the truth about the letter he received will lead him on a dark journey of discovery and psychological horror that will stay with you for quite awhile. While SH2 is a sequel to the first game, with the exception of the setting and the fact the monsters are based on the psychological manifestations of the key story character, the game has little story connection to the first game which revolved around a doomsday cult trying to perform some unholy spell to summon their god. SH2 was smart enough to kind of drop that whole premise and instead focus on a more personal story that ultimately leaves you the player wondering if Silent Hill is some kind of eldritch location that manifests your worst fears, or if the whole scenario is simply the result of James' own mental breakdown from his grief. The game actually has a more sly hint that the "monsters" James encounters are not actually monsters but possibly people. It's easy to miss but I liked the idea. Overall, SH2 isn't exactly a "scary" game but it's a very mind twisting one as you deal with the unreliable narrator of James and delve into the psychosis of the games unhinged cast. It's amazing how many interpretations the plot has gotten from fans over the years and I feel this is why SH2 is often considered to be the best entry because it's never straightforward like the other entries. The game has multiple endings and none of them give a clear answer to anything and it's debatable whether you can consider any of them as "good" but instead left to the player's decision. I got the "In Water" ending at first, and frankly, I find it to be the most satisfying for myself but other fans I've spoken to consider some of the other endings to be the "right one". I honestly appreciate this level of discourse the game brings up. Hell even Pyramid Heads role is often debated by fans, with some feeling he's Silent Hills knockoff of Resident Evils Tyrant who stalks James throughout the game to murder him, whereas other players feel Pyramid Head may actually be a guiding figure trying to set James on the "correct path" whereas another character is the one misleading James. SH has taken cues from several movies and stories over the years, and one in particular that SH2 borrows from is a film called Jacob's Ladder. It's the story of an ex-Vietnam vet struggling to cope with the grief of his son's death and the eventual dissolution of his marriage while also the PTSD he obtained in the war. He starts being plagued by visions of monsters and hallucinates disturbing scenes. The film offers two explanations for his problems and leaves it up to the audience to come to their own choice of what it is. Fun fact, James' outfit in SH2 is modeled directly after one worn by the main character in this film. Another film associated with this game is Solaris, a psychological sci-fi story by Polish author Stanislaw Lem about a psychologist investigating a space station studying a strange planet that might have life on it, only to discover that the whole crew is being haunted by apparitions that take the form of love ones or people they knew, in the case of the main character, his dead wife. As a it of a film buff, these parallels and shout outs to great cinema is much appreciated, and you can tell Team Silent drew upon these inspirations to help craft the games intriguing cast of characters. James is a broken and unassertive every man, hardly heroic and sometimes selfish or at least insensitive to the plight of others. Not someone to look up to, but also deeply sympathetic. The other cast members also become more nuanced as you slowly unravel their stories and personal demons. The lone exception being Laura, who is pretty much just a bratty little girl from beginning to end. Okay, so let's talk about the big pink elephant in the room here. I have spent a lot of time talking about the story and characters but not a whole lot on the gameplay. Well remember when I mentioned this game was an oddity on this list? Well it's because I don't really care for the gameplay, which may be a large part of why I get so easily distracted with the other entries because they take longer to get me invested in the story so I'll suffer through the games asinine puzzles, clunky tank controls, and awful combat mechanics. I could never recommend this game purely on it's gameplay, yet what is a bit odd is that I don't feel like SH2 would have the same kind of impact had it been written as another medium. I don't feel like you would have gotten the same sense of isolation, moodiness, and ambiguity had it been a film or book. Traversing and exploring Silent Hill as you uncover clues feels like an integral part of the experience, and something would be lost without it. I reaffirmed this recently when I was trying to explain the story to a coworker recently and found the story falls flat without the extra moodiness of the world. The saving graces of the gameplay besides the atmosphere and secrets it provides are the fact that you can actually lobotomize the game to the point it becomes a simple adventure game if you want, and if you do bother with the combat, the enemies are surprisingly indifferent and easy to deal with. Not like SH1 where everything in town is fast, aggressive, and will relentlessly follow you faster than you can really run. SH3 and 4 pull similar stunts with enemies designed to block your progression until you fight them, or the obnoxious ghosts you have to and often fail to avoid. So I appreciate the fact that the enemies are just as interested in fighting as I am in SH2. In terms of atmosphere, Silent Hill 2 is incredibly creepy. The fog and the sound of the radio going off will chill you as you try to anticipate from which direction the enemy will be coming from and the dark world makes it even more unsettling. I actually feel the radio is a real clever idea as I feel the anticipation of attack is more unnerving than simply being surprised. The town has a washed out and dirty vibe, feeling like a town that was abandoned after severe flood damage and I like how this differentiates the game from the other entries that always went with an industrial "blood and rust" aesthetic. The town is surprisingly huge and you have far more freedom to explore than you would imagine. Of anything, it's a bit surprising to learn how many areas are accessible despite the game giving you no real reason to ever explore beyond the story path but it's actually kind of refreshing to take a detour from time to time if not just to find some extra resources to survive but to also uncover more clues and weird mind screw moments. The ending I received on my first playthrough is largely only obtainable by actually exploring the town as the event flags for it involve finding certain clues scattered about town. In fact, SH2's treatment of the multiple endings are pretty clever because they're largely subtle and never break the illusion of the story to remind you you're playing a game which is really a testament to the design teams writing and design capabilities. There is so many really cool directing cues in this game as well. I mean seriously this is one of those games where picking it apart reveals layers of really well thought out choices and design decisions and it's a damn shame modern horror films can't muster up the same level of care. Another thing I must gush about is the game amazing soundtrack. I was a little put off at first with some of the jazzier tracks that seemed a little too energetic for such a moody title but it frankly works better than I thought and ends up giving diversity that a simple doom and gloom OST could provide. I ended up buying the OST shortly after finishing the game because I was so impressed with the music and I've been using it to help with some of my own writing projects since the games soundtrack is great for character moments. Even if you're not into horror games or the game sounds boring, I would still implore people to give the soundtrack a listen cause it's really well done and helps sell the world and experience which is what a good soundtrack should do.Overall, Silent Hill 2 is a chilling and atmospheric tale about grief, anger, sexuality, and self loathing. A claustrophobic experience with many twists and turns that will keep you hooked even if you have to deal with troutty controls and tedious gameplay. It won't take long before you understand why all the post-Team Silent era games ape the hell out of this game's design. It was easily the series Magnum Opus despite making two pretty solid efforts afterwards. Check this game out, I don't often recommend games purely on the merits of the story, but this is one of the few I do.
Coming Up: Reinforcements? I AM the reinforcements!
Gonna try that game eventually and cry out of fear
I cried. But defo not out of fear
I couldn’t get into silent hill 2 as much as everybody else seemed to, but it’s still fantastic. I need to get a hold of these games and do a series play through sometime.
Symphony of the Night still gets regular playtime on my Vita. More-so than Super Castlevania IV which I always thought was my favourite. It's a tough call now!
I can't believe I still haven't played Ico. Shadow of the Colossus is one of my all-time favourite games. I bought the PS3 collection with both games on. It's terrible that I haven't even booted up Ico... or bought The Last Guardian yet. Ugh, I need more time.
My only experience with Silent Hill was either 1 or 2, I think it was the first one. I was running down a foggy alley and I was being followed by some kind of reincarnated foetuses... I was like "I don't smurfing think so" and noped out of it.
The letter broke me, tbh
Oh yeah, I forgot you covered Twilight Princess too. This is also my favourite 3D entry in the Zelda series. I loved the more mature look over Ocarina of Time's cartoony style. I also loved unashamedly using my Wii controller as a sword :lol:
The dungeons are great in all Zelda games but they definitely stood out in this one.
16.In the year 2000, the world did not end thanks to Y2K, and Squaresoft performed a miracle. They made a game that got a perfect score on Famitsu, back when that meant something. To put this in better perspective, a magazine that has been around since 1986, had only given out two perfect scores before this point. Nintendo's Ocarina of Time and Namco's Soulcalibur. So yeah, it was a tough magazine to please back then. Since 2008 they hand out on average three perfect scores a year and I'm sure most of us would agree that Nintendogs, MGS4, and JoJo's Bizarre Adventure Battle All-Star are not the first titles to come to mind that represent absolute gaming perfection that every critic loves. So yeah, this was a big deal back then and the game was Matsuno's sophomore effort with Square, Vagrant Story. Set in Valendia, Vagrant Story is actually a flashback tale concerning the mysterious events surrounding a terrorist attack on a Duke's Manor by a mysterious cult, and the same Duke being assassination a week later under mysterious circumstances. The only person who can truly answer the question is a VKP Agent named Ashley Riot who was put on the mission to deal with the conspiracy but mysteriously disappeared during the mission. The story proper begins when the Cult Mullenkamp attack the Duke's Manor to look for something. Hearing about the attack, the Church send in the Crimson Blades a violent group of soldiers who deal with religious heretics to deal with the group, but darker conspiracies are afoot as the government dispatches their agent Ashley Riot to the scene as well. Ashley is a Riskbreaker, an elite unit among the VKP who deal with Black Ops for the government that are often tantamount to being suicide missions. His partner for the mission is an intelligence officer named Merlose who is new to field work and has never worked with a Riskbreaker before. Ashley encounters the cult's leader, the mysterious and charismatic Sydney Losstarot who brandishes a mysterious power called the Dark. The cult escapes capture along with a hostage in the Duke's son, but Ashley and the Crimson Blades follow them back to the cursed and abandoned city of Lea Monde, where Mullenkamp's religion began. The city is inundated with the power of the Dark and the Ashley and Sydney find themselves in a cat and mouse game that involves the dark secrets of the city, while both avoid the wrath of the Crimson Blades.Ashley winds up dealing with far more than he thought with killing Sydney and rescuing the hostage. His own past comes back to haunt him thanks to the dark powers of the city which brings to light the things that mankind wishes to remain buried. Soon Ashley begins to doubt who he is and why he is there, all while discovering the darker conspiracies between the Duke, Sydney, the Church and even his own government as everyone races to find the Gran Grimoire of Lea Monde, which will grant the full power of the Dark to whoever wields it. I think it's safe for me to say that not only is Vagrant Story Matsuno's best written work, despite his usual unfinished nature of most of his games, but it really is his magnum opus. It's easy to gloss over the many layers it brings to the player and the game has a Kojima level skill in making you doubt what you know. Heroes turn out to be villains, villains are secretly heroes of their own stories, and Ashley gets just as badly mind screwed by his superiors and the bad guys as all of the Snakes in the Metal Gear series. What I love about the game is how non-definitive everything kind of is. Part of this is due to the game's rushed development of course, as some plot threads are left unanswered, but it works surprisingly well to leave a lasting impression as you wonder what became of the games cool cast and wonder ho Ashley truly is. Speaking of that, I'll say again what I usually say about this but I feel Ashley does Cloud's story from VII much better, mainly by remaining ambiguous. You are given a quick backstory to Ashley in the beginning of the game, but soon Sydney and a few other characters begin to offer a different take on what Ashley remembers and it changes your perspective on the character. Is he a tragic figure with nothing else to live for, or a monster who simply lost the taste for blood and brainwashed to still serve his masters. A neat gameplay-story integration is that Ashley doesn't learn abilities, he remembers them, and I will say that the man is a beast. The game does not mince words or pretend that your victories are not some kind of great feat. It would have been nice if someone would say they were impressed you slayed a god in Dark Souls, especially when the fight was well earned. In retrospect, it's no surprise that games like Dark Souls and Bloodborne are on this list, while it's never been opening admitted, I feel it's safe to say that Vagrant Story was likely an influence on both games, though probably not as much as Berserk, Lovecraft, and King's Field but like those games, Vagrant Story is about a lone warrior braving a dark and labyrinth eldritch location where monster feast on men and the dead do not go quietly into the eternal embrace. To describe VS at best is that it's a Medieval MGS title with the Sci-Fi elements replaced with dark fantasy and light horror elements. The game does a pretty good job of making Lea Monde feel like an unsettling place and a better job encountering monsters and the undead actually feel kind of like an "oh trout" moment. One of my favorite moments in the game is when you encounter a Crimson Blade Sorcerer, who tries to wield the power of the Dark to summon a monster like Sydney does, only for the spell to kill him. Just when you think everything is over, the guy gets back up, reanimated by the power of the Dark, and his spell completes to summon an enchanted suit of armor. which segues into a dual boss battle. Gameplay is very difficult to describe. VS falls into the same camp as Zelda and incorporates enough elements from other genres in such an equal amount that it's difficult to really pigeonhole the game into one genre. It's a dungeon crawler with a quasi-turn base action RPG battle system in which your weapon choice effects your attack range and you choose a part of the body to attack before using timed button presses to chain together attacks to either kill or at least cripple the enemy. This is all interspersed with block puzzles, light platforming, and heavy weapon crafting. Bosses are huge and dangerous, but even the mooks can destroy you if you're careless or ill prepared for them. In fact, a couple fully outfitted Crimson Blades are generally a bigger threat than some of the bosses in this game. One of the most controversial elements of the game is the Risk system, something I hated when I first played the game but have honestly grown to really appreciate and love. As your character chains together attacks, his Risk Meter fills up which dramatically reduces his hit rate, lowers his physical and magical resistance, and skyrockets his critical hit rate. What this means is that as the Risk bar fills, you miss more often and are far more susceptible to damage, even being weak enough to get one-shotted by enemies if they land a critical hit that takes all your health. On the other hand, what few attacks you do land will almost always be a critical hit, and your own healing magic will heal more than normal, so it kind of balances out. You're only means of reducing Risk is to let it go down slowly after disengaging from combat mode which can be very risky in battle since your shield is kind of important to your defense, or by consuming limited items that should likely be saved for later battles. Instead the system works best in short spurts as you attack just enough to get a few good hits in without raising your risk too much and then keep your distance until a new opening appears. You could also try doing an infinite chain of attacks and pray the occasional critical hit will kill the creature before you screw up and it murders you. Course timing slightly changes over time and I believe the game actually has a limit before it will automatically make you miss. It's a neat mechanic that adds a lot of tactical value to the game much like Stamina in the Souls series.It also makes you rely more on buffs and debuffs to save your hide as well which are often a 100x more useful than the games few measly attack spells. Weapon crafting is generally more useful as you find shops to build better weapons from the ones you find or pick off enemies, and the mechanic has an incredibly amount of depth I don't wish to repeat. Short version, weapons come in a variety of forms and materials which work more effectively on certain enemy types. As your character battles certain monsters with a weapon, that weapon's effectiveness against said monster increases, but it decreases against other types of monsters. The easiest way to get through the game is to build different weapons to suit different monsters and situations. Build a crossbow to deal with beast types like bats or goblins. Use silver weapons to deal with ghosts and undead. Hammers against Golems and crab monsters etc. etc...The dungeon crawling aspect also has a slight Metroidvania element going on for it as you will explore the labyrinth corridors that lead to different sections of the city. Sometimes the way forward is blocked by magic seals or locked doors that need keys so you'll have to backtrack to find a new way forward, but it's still pretty exhilarating slowly expanding the city until you reach the Necrohol which is filled with possessed murder dolls, creatures with instant death magic, and the leveled up versions of the Liches. I will admit the map mechanic could be better, and sort of explains why 3D Maps are not much of a thing. Also the Snowfly "wannabe Lost Woods" Forest can go smurf itself. As a late PS1 game, VS is surprisingly still good looking and Yoshida's artstyle really shines through, especially with Sakimoto's soundtrack. In fact it's easy to see some stylistic parallels between this game and the teams work on FFXII. In fact several ideas and visual styles were used for the Final Fantasy game. What's really surprising to know is that despite the few callbacks and references to FFTactics, VS was originally a standalone title. Made most obvious by the fact the Church of the game is specifically mentioned to be Christian. It was made part of the Ivalice series retroactively, but I feel it's a nice touch that several lore aspects of the game ended up having a major impact on XII such as Arcadia being placed in the Valendia region, and the references to the Kildean Faith. I'm almost surprised Lea Monde wasn't named dropped either. Overall, VS is a pretty sweet experience, a fund and twisting game in both its story and gameplay. It's like nothing else I've ever played and if you love Matsuno's titles you kind of owe yourself to play through this game. It's been slowly climbing my list over the years and every time I do another playthrough, I end up loving it more. Definitely a game I didn't appreciate at the time because I was too blind to see the games excellent design and cool concepts.
Coming up: Doesn't that beat all?
I still need to play this game. I tried as a kid and absolutely hated it, but I just sucked at games and was probably expecting it to be more like ff.
Vagrant Story is smurfing amazing
Vagrant Story is a gem I didn't discover until recently but I'm glad I did.
15.Time to discuss my favorite entry in the Breath of Fire franchise. It's interesting how some series, when they made the leap from the old platforms to the PlayStation, decided to really explore more adult themes in their games and recast old, but typically stereotype evil bad guys as more complicated figures. I feel games like FFVII started the trend, but I would I feel BoFIII actually handled this element a little better. As I've mentioned before, starting with the second game, the series began to incorporate darker and more mature themes before it was completely swallowed up by it in BoFV. BoFIII is the entry I felt hit a perfect balance of being an idealistic adventure story, but one not afraid to tackle some really unsettling themes and scenarios. FFVII only briefly deals with the idea of your characters actions being wrong, and never once dwells on the ramifications. BoFIII is a game where you're going to end up doing some unsavory things from time to time, well in between trying to make the perfect sushi for a finicky mayor or train some wimp to fight the town bully. I'm getting ahead of myself.Breath of Fire III is the third and final entry in the "Myria Trilogy" though it takes most of it's story connections to the first game. In the distant past, dragons fought a terrible war that nearly destroyed the world before God stepped in and put a stop to it. For their hubris, dragons became extinct and the only reminder of their magnificence is their corpses that have turned into a magical crystal called Chrysm that fuels the modern age. The tale begins in a mine trying to extract this chrysm when some minors discover a baby dragon frozen in a huge piece of chrysm. Assuming it didn't survive the process they chalk it up as an oddity and blow open the chrysm to gain it, only to discover to their horror, the dragon pup is very much alive. Knocking it out after sustaining several casualties, the crew ship it off to Wyndia by train but the creature rocks it's cage and escapes. Having taken the form of a little boy, he is saved by a pre-teen Woren named Rei. A local orphan boy who steals and robs from the locals for survival. He takes the young dragon boy named Ryu back to his home where he meets Teepo, another boy about Ryu's age who is also a thief. The two train Ryu in the art of being a thief, but the town they harass is well aware of the boys antics and only put up with it due to pity. Unfortunately a weak harvest has stretched food and money in the town, especially due to unfair taxes, so the boys resort to burglary and try to rob the home of a local Lumberjack named Bunyan who catches them in the act. Wishing to teach the boys a lesson about society preferring people who earn their living by doing good deeds for society, he forces Ryu and Teepo to help him chop wood while he assigns Rei the task of hunting a dangerous monster that has been preying on the towns crops and livestock. Concerned about their friend, the boys follow after them after completing their chore and help Rei to track the beast. When they corner it, it is desperately trying to protect a cave but the three triumph and kill the creature. Curious about what it was guarding, they discover the monster was a mother with cubs, but her children had died from undernourishment but she was still trying to find food for them. Bunyan had been well aware of this but asked them to put the grieving mother out of her misery. Despite feeling bad for their actions, the boys are celebrated as heroes by the town and start getting better treatment which makes them feel better about the whole thing, until they are targeted by a local named Loki who asks the boys to "fix" an injustice is the form of the corrupt mayor's unfair taxes. He asks the boys to break into the manor and steal the taxes back for the town, which they gleefully do. Unfortunately, the town is horrified by these actions, especially since the boys are unaware that the mayor works for a major crime organization and their higher taxes are due to a "protection racket". Ostracized by the town, the boys return home to discover it's been torched by two of the organizations leg breakers, Balio and Sunder, who proceed to attack the boys and take their lives as an example to others who cross the syndicates path. Ryu barely survives the ordeal, but loses track of Rei and Teepo, yet holds onto the hope that Rei and Teepo survived as well, and thus he begins a journey to find his friends. The plot is largely told in three acts with summary above detailing the first act. The first half of the game deals with Ryu's journey to find his friends and escape from Balio and Sunder, during this time, Ryu discovers his dragon powers and his connection to the Brood, the name of the Dragon Clan. His journey soon switches to wanting to meet God to learn more about his race and why God saw it fit to have his race genocide which actually leads into Ryu's adult life as well. Like Wild Arms before it, BoFIII explores a theme of Power and what it is actually good for, as well as the value of a life, even if it is dangerous or unnatural. The game is filled with scenarios that will make Ryu and the player question these themes and the moral choices concerning them. The game does a fairly good job of shifting perception and keeping the central themes in a morally gray area for the player. While you can probably still feel the villains actions went too far, the greater scope of the world given towards the end, reveals that their actions were certainly for the betterment of life. For a game that is often very goofy and plays the humor quick and often, the game packs some hard hitting moments. I also appreciate the fact the game has a time skip. You begins the game with Ryu as a child of maybe eight years of age but the game ends with him as a teen whose bitter travels have honed him into a hardier fighter. It's interesting to see that kind of growth and it actually makes the early sections of the adult life interesting as you revisit characters from the first half to see what they've been up to. The cast, for me at least, is fantastic and I really don't feel like there is a bad egg in the whole bunch. Even team pet Peco ends up having a major character revelation towards the end of the game that subverts it's role in the story and makes subsequent playthroughs more interesting in hindsight. The Ryu of this game is actually my favorite and I love how the game really shows his personality through with some of his animations despite being a typical silent protagonist. When Ryu first begins fighting in the game, he's terrified of combat and basically waves the sword frantically without looking while he braces himself for a hit. After he gets some good levels in and a few story moments, Ryu begins to fight with more confidence. It's interesting to watch him go from barely knowing how to use a sword, to two handing the weapon to better balance with his small frame, and then see his adult form effortlessly fight one-handed. Nina was a character I initially hated cause I always found her a bit too emotionally needy and ditzy, but getting over myself a little has allowed me to come around and see her as a fun comic relief character in the first half of the game and a strong moral support in the second half. Rei and Teepo's story in the game is pretty heartbreaking, and probably some of the most impactful story telling in the game. Momo is amusing since she often feels detached from Ryu's story and only goes along since his journey is often leading her to discover the truth about machines and the world's past. Her own story involving her father's research lead to some of the darker moments of the plot that deal with how science should be used, the value of a life that wasn't meant to be, and environmentalism. Garr is practically a late arriving deuteragonist to the story which ties deeply into Ryu's story as he tries to find answers to his own path and questions his faith in God. Overall, I feel it's safe to say this game has my favorite cast in the series and one of the few games where I don't have to force myself to use everyone. Gameplay-wise, BoFIII is easily my favorite entry in the franchise, and much like Wild Arms, I feel the game best embodies what I want out of an RPG from a gameplay structure. Like previous installments, every character has an action they could on the field which can be useful for dungeon exploring. Hunting is gone for the moment, but fishing remains and is a huge improvement over BoFII's simple design. The Manillo Merchants have also changed as they no longer sell goods, but trade them for the fishes you catch, giving you even more incentive to actually fish than just free health items. III's greatest accomplishments is the Master system, which is basically a vastly improved version of FFVI's Esper system. Characters can find masters and apprentice themselves under them, which will modify their stats as they level up as well as teach a skill every few levels in the game. Only one of a skill can ever be obtained, but the game allows you to switch skills among the party or place them in a book for later use or to dispose of skills that have become obsolete. Gaining the approval of a master leads to some interesting sidequest shenanigans such as a chef who wants you to fetch items for them, a master who refuses to teach you skills until you finish learning another master's skills, and even one that involves a global hide and seek game. This system is complimented by the act that every character in the game already performs a role in battle, so Masters can either be used to increase their specialty's or cover their weaknesses. Ryu is your main damage dealer, but he's also the team medic surprisingly enough. Nina is a black mage type character, Rei is a speedy thief, and Garr is a slow tanky brawler. Weapon loadout is more important in this game than the previous ones, due to EX Turns. If your character is fast enough due to high speed stats and light gear, they can gain an extra turn after battle. This can be expanded on by the team formation skills which can garner some additional effects like increased defense for the whole party, doubling the point characters attack power, or even giving the team the same speed as the point man. There is a serious amount of great customization skills in this game.I haven't even mentioned that your party can learn additional monster skills in battle by simply observing the enemy to help expand their skill repertoire.The cherry on top of all of this is the Dragon Gene system, which is easily the coolest Dragon system in the series. Ryu can obtain crystallized dragon genes that grant him various abilities. Some genes add an elemental property, some grant a statistical property, and some simply add certain skills or properties. Each gene has an AP cost and you are allowed to combine three genes to customize the type of dragon Ryu can become, after the initial casting cost, Ryu must expend 10% of that cost every round to maintain the form which makes playing conservative with combination to keep cost down important but also balances the system out compared to the previous installments. As an example of how this works, Ryu begins with a Fire Gene which turns him into a Dragon Pup with Fire based skills, if you combine it with an Eldritch Gene which grants a defensive bonus, Ryu becomes and Adult Dragon with better stats and an additional skill in addition to the fire skills. There are actually several unique dragon forms that require certain combinations of genes, and the game even introduces a Fusion Gene to create unique dragon hybrids with attributes of most of the party much like Karn's Fusion skill in the first game. It's a pretty cool system that makes the ones that come after it pale in comparison. III also introduces the Fairy Village, an evolution from the town building mechanic from II which has been in every BoF since. You basically get to build and maintain a town but instead of hunting down citizens you simply manage its growth and have the fairies brainstorm job ideas which you can then have the town implement like a shop that sells rare items, one that plays the games soundtrack, and one that even duplicates items. While it's nowhere near as game breaking as some of the entries like II's stat abusing citizen or V's infinite money exploit, the town is actually fairly balance and pretty damn fun as a sidequest. The game does suffer a little of the Breath of Fire problem, which is where the game plot sometimes falls off the rails to deal with mini-game/sidequest nonsense. It's not quite as bad as II and IV though, but the game does have a few really obnoxious quests that will drag the momentum of the story to a standstill. The aforementioned Sashimi/Sushi quest being a particularly hated one by the fans. Others are incredibly charming like helping a hapless accountant train to fight a burly sailor which involves your own party beating the crap out of the kid to raise his stats. Nothing is quite as satisfying as watching this kid no sell everything the bully throws at him before one shotting him with his wooden sword. Other than that, the game is usually pretty good about keeping you moving forward with most of the setbacks being purely plot related such as Ryu and Nina's bad fortune in the first half of the game before Garr starts helping them.The sprite work in this game is still fantastic in quality and while some people bemoaned it at the time, I really like BoFIII's unique jazz influenced soundtrack which sets it apart from both the other entries in the series as well as other RPGs in general. It might not have the best OST (IV and V have better ones) but I really dig it and it's nice to have a serious change of pace since the genre is kind of bad about having music that sounds too similar. In the end, Breath of Fire III embodies my ideal RPG. While there are several I love more than it for various reasons, and there are several games that do things better than it, it's kind of a good starting point for me. I love having a cast of unique characters in both plot and gameplay, but I also appreciate the fact the game has a deep and meaningful customization system that allows me to tinker with them. The system is pretty balanced, and the puzzles and sidequests are pretty damn fun. The story falls into that deceptive territory of feeling like a silly and fun idealistic adventure, before it sucker punches you with more mature themes and plotlines that subvert the colorful world and makes you see it as the more gray and gray morality that it really is. It has strong narrative themes that remain consistent throughout the plot with several smaller stories that lead back to these themes interspersed throughout the game to give the plot real purpose and something to mull over long after you finish playing. The game introduces clever retcons that end up changing your perception of the previous titles in a positive light. It's overall just a pretty damn great game and I feel everyone should play it.
Coming Up: What lies at the other side of this tangled web of memory is...punishment? Or...
BoF3 is my favorite as well. I love all the characters.
I need to finish this. I was enjoying it
pssst you're wrong and iv was better
Breath of Fire III was one of my first RPGs and remains a damn good game. Somehow I never got around to playing most of the other BoF games.
14.
Oh hey look, it's another game I'm going to cheat on because it's actually two games, but I would be lying if I said this would be the last time I did this :shifty: . To be fair, the P2 Duology actually tells one story and was originally meant to be one game, but was split in two for various reasons during the production of what would become Innocent Sin. Now, I'm going to kind of do something I've largely avoided for most of this thread except on few occasions, I'm actually going to be spoiling elements of the plot. Partly because it is a pain in the ass to try and explain Eternal Punishment's story without referencing what happened in Innocent Sin and partly because it's incredibly difficult to convey how cool this all is without explaining some key points as well. On their own, IS is a goofy if unsettling game, and EP is pretty convoluted but intriguing title. Taken as a whole though, P2 is an extremely ambitious title with a very complex and intriguing story. While I will clearly mark when I will jump from one game to another, if you want to play the titles spoiler free, you may want to just pass on reading this entry of my list. On the other hand, I played the games out of order and not knowing the events of IS while playing EP didn't exactly ruin the experience for me, but I know everyone is different.
Innocent Sin takes place three years after Persona 1, in the first timeline, at Sumara City and the story begins around Seven Sister's High School. Tatsuya Suou is our main protagonist, a quiet and reserved kid who loves motorcycles and a lighter given to him by a childhood friend, despite his aloof nature he's very popular at the school which gives him a lot of unwanted attention from gangs in rival schools and girls at his own. One such character is Lisa Silverman, a Japan born native whose parents are from the U.S. which makes her stand out like a sore thumb. In the past she was ostracized but now her non-Japanese features make her a bit of a celebrity at school. The two of them get mixed up with Eikechi "Michel" Mishima from a rival high school who is a narcissistic lead singer of a punk band,the top "bully" of his school, and said to have "psychic ability". The conflict turns out to be a ploy by Eikichi's band mates to get Tatsuya to join their band but the whole scenario turns into a fight between the three and all three reveal to have the power of Persona. They all collapse and meet Philemon, the personification of the positive aspect of the Collective Unconscious, who explains what their Persona power is and warns them that they will need it due to a strange phenomena going on in which rumors are becoming true in the city. After waking up, the trio test out what he says by doing the Joker Rumor which states that if you call your own number on your cell phone, a magical Harlequin in a pristine suit will appear and grant your desire. This turns out to come true but it seems that the Joker knows the three of them and blames them for some unknown crime. He steals the ideal energy from Eikichi's band mates and disappears vowing revenge.
While trying to figure out what's going on, they meet encounter Maya Amano and Persona 1 veteran Yukino Mayazumi, who work for a popular teen magazine that is investigating high school rumors. The five of them band together as the rumors about demons becomes true and their personas allow them to fight back. They soon uncover a cult called the Masked Circle that is following Joker's will and collecting ideal energy from people for some scheme. Tatsuya, Eikichi, and Lisa all recognize the name of Masked Circle and as they travel together, a strange familiarity between the three and Maya begins to grow as they battle the four Generals of the Masked Circle and try to uncover their connection to Joker.
Eventually the group remembers their connection to the Masked Circle and each other. As children, Tatsuya, Eikichi, Lisa, a fourth boy named Jun, and an older sister type girl would meet at the Araya Shrine to play. The kids all banded together over their love of a Sentai series called Featherman and each wore a mask representing one of the characters. Though Jun and Tatsuya were friends, the others never really took off their masks and the group bonded over being friends who never judged each other as the masks protected them from their problems like Tatsuya and Jun's troubled home lives, Lisa's appearance, and Eikichi's weight problem. Their club became the Masked Circle and their Big Sis taught them the Persona game which is how they all have Personas. When the kids found out their Big Sis was moving away, the children conspired to lock her in the shrine so she could leave with the exception of Jun. Unfortunately for the kids, a serial arsonist was in the neighborhood and set the shrine on fire. Tatsuya came back to the shrine to let his Big Sis out, but was attacked by the arsonist. Believing they caused the death of their Big Sis due to their selfishness, the group disbanded and buried the trauma in their memories. Te group soon realize that Joker must be Jun, the only member against locking their sis away and who would have knowledge of the Masked Circle, something that really hits Tatsuya hard since the two were the closest. What does come as a surprise is that Maya turns out to be their Big Sis, she was able to escape the shrine with her life but was terribly traumatized by the ordeal and was how she gained her pyrophobia. The group uses these revelations to renew their pursuit of Jun and convince him to stop their madness, especially since they now know that Maya is alive.
Unfortunately, by this time, the Rumor issue has spiraled out of control in the public sphere and major conspiracy theories begin to materialize as truth such as Hitler surviving WWII and biding his time to rebuild his army for world domination and another concerning a book of Mayan prophecy that reveals that the Mayans were an alien race that built a special ship beneath the city in order to save a part of mankind from a disaster and lead them to enlightenment. It turns out The Masked Circle and Hitler are both after this ship and begin trying to make the prophecy come true. The group is able to get Jun back, but it doesn't stop the Masked Circle and the cult and the Nazis proceed with getting the prophecy to come truewhich allows the Mayan ship Xibalba to activate and rise above the earth. The party still has a chance to prevent the final part of the prophecy from coming true, and so they race to the center of the ship to stop Hitler. It's then revealed that Hitler and a few other figures in the story are actually the same entity and the one responsible for the rumors coming true to begin with. Nyalarthotep, the Crawling Chaos, and physical personification of all the Negative Traits of the Collective Unconscious has been orchestrating the whole phenomena of rumors and taking different forms to manipulate people to get hsi plan working. While the party is able to defeat him, Nyalarthotep arranges for Maya to be killed and fulfill the prophecy, ending the world outside of the ship. He then reveals that this whole ordeal had simply been a bet between him and Philemon to test the true character of humanity. With Maya dead, the world below destroyed and the villain gone to celebrate his victory, Philemon appears and gives the party a choice. He can send them to an alternate timeline where the events of the game never transpiredand Maya lives, but the condition is that the five of them can never meet and be friends, they must be strangers in this new reality and forget everything that happened. Heartbroken, the group agrees and Philemon send them to their new home, except one of them breaks the promise.
Eternal Punishment picks up a few months after Innocent Sin in the new and current Persona universe. The game has shifted to Maya as the protagonist, and in a major shift for the series, the cast are mostly filled with adults in their mid to late twenties. In the beginning Maya comes across a strange boy whom she swears she recognizes but can't remember where, she calls him her Deja Vu Boy and can't really get the thought of his identity out of her head. She is tasked by her editor at the magazine to investigate a startling rumor that seems to be coming true called the JOKER Curse, where if someone calls their own cellphone, they can summon JOKER and have him kill whoever they want. Maya takes her roommate Ulala, an old friend with relationship issue and lack of direction in her life,to Seven Sisters High School for a quick interview, when they discover that someone hired JOKER to kill the principle. They then encounter Katsuya, Tatsuya's (yes it gets annoying) older brother who works as a sergeant for the police who arrives when the incident is called in. They try to find information on what's going when the three encounter JOKER who has been hired to kill Maya. Fighting him off with their awakened personas, the group have a run in with Maya's Deja Vu boy, who turns out to be Tatsuya, but he vanishes before they can get an answer out of him. The trio look towards Baofu, an underworld information broker with a shady past, to get a new lead and he informs them that rumors say that JOKER is connected to a parliament member named Tatsuzou Sudou, who is said to have ties with Taiwanese Mafia which intrigues Baofu enough to join them. They learn he has a son institiutionalized after he was caught doing arson as a teenager (This is the same guy who burned down the Araya Shrine in IS and he was one of the leaders of the Masked Circle) so they go to the hospital to only find that he has escaped. His room is revelaed to be covered in writing talking about the "Other Side", and only after do they find out he's in the hospistal and fighting off a hit squad called in on him by his father. The group chases after Sudou who keeps orchestrating events simialr to several of the Masked Circle events from IS and eventually the group are able to corner him with Tatsuya's help and end his tyranny, but Tatsuya reveals there is more to what's going on before diasappearing again.
At this point the story falls into a conflict between Maya's group and the NWO being secretly controlled by Nyalarthotep. I am also seriously generalizing and condencing this plot so there will be a few more surprises, but yeah, game winds up being a redemption arc and i's pretty damn epic by the second game. EP itself makes a lot of use of the theme of Deja Vu and there are several call backs to the first game. In fact the first half of the game plays like an alternate take on the events of the first game, with you going through several of the same locations and relieving new versions of events. It goes a bit deeper as well because so many of the major players and plot elements of EP are minor characters or undeveloped plot threads in IS. You learn about Sudou's past and his father in the first game but never actually meet the man, whereas he's the primary antagonist for the second half of EP. Likewise, Tatsuya's relationship with his father and brother are only glossed over in IS but became major plot points in EP. Even the cast of EP barring Maya and Tatsuya are minor characters you encounter in IS, just as major players in IS are reduced to more minor roles in EP. It's almost like playing a time loop and it's really interesting to see the subtle and not so subtle changes between the two games. In the PS1 versions, you coul even transfer over some data to get a few extra bonuses, most of which affect Tatsuya's stats and gear but several choices made in the first game will have minor callbacks in the new game which is pretty neat if you ask me.I mentioned this in another thread, but P2 does actually have one of my favorite casts in the series, partly because they do a good job of balancing quirky personalties with down to earth problems that make them feel real, and also because despite the game being more traditional RPG before the franchise became a hybrid "dating sim", the surprising fact is that the characters are actually a bit more multi-faceted despite getting less screentime than the casts of later entries. I mean the IS cast all ddeal with an issue with their parents such as Eikichi and and Lisa being resentful at their father's trying to control their lives, Tatsuya and Jun are ashamed of their fathers and wish they had better parental role models, and Maya suffers from abandonement issues from her workaholic dad. The EP cast deal with more adult issues like Baofu's shady past with the Taiwanese Mafia, Katsuya's dealing with corruption within the police force and Ulala's self-esteem issues brought on by her directionless lifestyle and jealosy of Maya's career and good fortune. It's actually amusing going from this entry into the later ones as so many character traits and storyline get recycled in later games. The Tatsuya's relationship with his brother is reused in P5 with the Nijima sisters, Chie borrows several elements from Lisa such as her love of Kung-Fu and Cantonese. Junpei's relationship with the MC is actually just a redo of Ulala and Maya's relationship. P4's concept of Shadow-selves are taken directly from P2 with their origin being the only difference. So I have always found it interesting how much the newer team mines ideas from the game. Another aspect I love of the story is the cameos from other MegaTen games. Two non-Persona series characters pop up in the game in the form of Tamaki, the canon female lead from Shin Megami Tensei if... and Kuzunoah from Devil Summoner. Likewise, most of the P1 cast returns in some capacity over the course of both games with three of them being playable characters, which is kind of neat to see how everyone ended up after the first game and to watch the new cast get to see some serious veteran Persona users in action. The game also ties up a few loose ends from P1, but nothing so drastic that you need to play the first game to understand. Of anything the adult version of P1's cast are generally more likable than they were in the first game and a few people ended up getting redeemed for me.Gameplay is typical of many dungeon crawler style games, and I only feel to really talk about it here because most people know the later series style of gameplay more than this one. Characters can equip Personas to change their stats and use the Personas abilities and strengths and weaknesses to customize themselve sin battle. Peronas Rank Up as they are used which allows them to acquire new skills and it also boosts their stats. When a Persona reaches maximum rank, they can be traded back to the Velvet Room for an item. Sometimes when you use a Persona, a Mutation may occur which will either unlock a hidden skill or allow the Persona to evolve into a new form, with several types of Persona only being avilable through this method. Battles are turn based and utilize a new Fusion Spell system in which the order you have characters use their abilites will cause them to combine their power for a more powerful skill. Since most of these fusion spells are tied to the skills and the order they are performed, you are encouraged to keep replacing weak personas with new ones. There are some powerful and unique Fusion Spells tied to specific Personas though. It's a nice system that keeps you upgrading them quickly but allows even weak Personas to stay relevant longer. To say it's a far better and more balanced system than P1 is an understatement. Like the MegaTen series and Persona 1 before it, characters have the option of talking their way out of conflict. In the case of IS, the game expands on P1's version where each character has four unique talking points based on their character traits to try and use on monsters for positive results. IS introduces the idea of team conversations where several characters can be present and create unique conversation pieces or enhance others. For instance, Tatsuya can join up with Eikichi's singing conversation piece by accompaning him with an electric guitar, or Maya and Yukino do a comedy stand up routine together. EP takes this idea and runs with it, which is vastly more fun to play with as it gives you a much better idea of how each character meshes with each other. Katusya the cop, and Baofu the extortionist don't get along due to their conflicting ideas of justice, but it makes a great Good Cop/Bad Cop conversation routine, and later when you learn they both like baseball, you unlock a new one between the two where they are arguing which of their teams is better. It's a really neat way to sneak in some character development without bogging the game's already slow pacing with story scenes.Probably my favorite quirk in the game, and a completionsit nightmare as well is the Rumor system. Rumors come true if they are believed by enough people or simply spread far enough. While this is a major source of conflict in the game, the party can actually use the system to their advantage by using the Kuzunoah detective agency to spread the rumors. You have to come up with a rumor, which somtimes the plot supplies but often requires your characters to visit the various rumormongers around town to learn the local gossip. You can then manipulate these rumors to your benefit. The simplest and most ingenius way this is used is for equipment. As normal high school students or law-abiding citizens living in Japan with it's strict weapon policies, you can spread rumors that cause a local Ramen Shop owner to turn out to be some blackmarket weapon smuggler or make loacl clothing stores start displaying armor as the new fashion. It's a clever way to incorporate standard RPG shops in a modern setting. I think only P5 has ever come close to coming up with something as clever. Rumors go beyonf this though as you can also use the system to help you find rare demosn to battle in order to get items needed for rare persona, and you can even teach specail spells to select personas through the system as well. Hell in IS, gining the ultimate weapons involves spreading rmors of people who have them, which often corresponds wit a cameo from a character in P1, and then spreading a rumor among the demons themselves on how powerful the weapon is. It's time consuming as smurf, but I really love how far the devs took the logic of the game's premise.Persona 2:Eternal Punishment was my second MegaTen title and my first Persona game. I ended up playing the game at a very rough time in my life when I needed to make some serious changes. Maya has a catchphrase in the game "Let's Think Positive" which was something I kind of needed at the time. So in addition ot just being a really well thought out game with some serious occult vibes going for it, it's also a game I associate with a time where I was starting to pick myself back up and gain some control over my life. I recommend this game, even if the dungeon design leads a lot to be desired and the game feels ver antiquated by today's standards, P2 is a very clever experiment by Atlus, in fact it was the last game to be developed by the actual MegaTen Team before the current Persona Team was assembled, so the game has this kind of trademark "rough around the edges" feel that I really love in the franchise.
Coming Up Next: "I won't cry! I won't give them the satisfaction! If I cry...it's like admitting the defeat of our family--defeat to the likes of them! And that's why... that's why I can't cry!"
Ohhhhh I know this next one :omgomg::omgomg:
I still need to play through eternal punishment. I wish we didn’t have to stick with the ps1 version as the bit I played kept throwing me off with the differences in names compared to the psp version of Innocent Sin, if I remember right.
I'm making my way through Eternal Punishment now, and it's actually not that hard to make the transition. The translation is very rough, so that makes things a bit harder, but then again, the battles are much more smoother and more enjoyable, so it evens out.
Love this duology, btw. And yeah, Innocent Sin is very goofy at most parts, but it's really telling of the writing quality that the story is still overall very dark and emotional and hits you extremely hard by the end.
Also, Maya is the best person alive and I love her very much.
https://static.zerochan.net/Amano.Maya.full.810089.jpg
13.When I first started thinking about this list a few years back, I knew this entry would be on here, but I expected it would be in the high 70s. Then when I decided to use the list to go back to do a reassessment on some titles, I found myself pleasantly surprised to see that not only did this game stand up, but was better than I actually remembered it. III has definitely aged a little worse than I had hoped for, but barring the games few issues, I feel the good elements ultimately outweigh those issues. Suikoden V takes place about ten years before the events of Suikoden 1, in the Queendom of Falena, a place that has been blessed by the Sun Rune but cursed with centuries of political infighting within the government. You play as the Prince, the oldest child of Queen Arshtat and her consort and Captain of the Queen's Knights, Ferid. Since leadership passes down through the women and not the men, your character ultimately gets stuck doing boring ambassador duties awaiting the day he'll be married off for some political ties. When the story begins, the Prince and his entourage, including his overprotective bodyguard Lyon, his politically savvy but incredibly lazy aunt Sialeeds, and the newest Queen's Knight Georg Prime, who is a friend from Ferid's past with a very rich military history that spans most of the series; are now returning from such an expedition to get an assessment of the damage done to the town of Lordlake. A few years before the story began, Lordlake had been the center of a rebellion that saw the sacking of a sacred temple and the theft of the Dawn Rune, which is one of the two runes needed to control the Sun Rune. Queen Arshtat ended up taking the Sun Rune upon herself and used it's powers to transform the town into a scorched desert that is barely hanging on and even more resentful of the royal family. Unfortunately, the True Rune the Queen has taken is beginning to warp her mind and giving her a god complex. Because of this, everyone in the palace, including her family are wary of her wrath.To get her mind off the troubles in Lordlake the family prepares for the Sacred Games, a Falena tradition where possible suitors for the future queen wage gladiatorial battles to see who will become the queen's consort and captain of the Queen's Knights. The Prince's little sister has started to come of age and the family is preparing to find out who their future in-law will be. The contest really comes down to which of the two major politically powerful noble houses will win the battle. The Barows family are a wealthy if very scheming faction that wants to play nice with the kingdom's enemies to help line their pockets and they are often accused of being too close to foreign governments. On the other side is the Godwin family, who are hardliners who preach of military conquest and wanting to create a more unified and nationalistic Queendom. These two factions scheming against each other have caused several succession wars within the queendom, including a fairly recent one which resulted in the death of several family members on both sides and the royal family. When the games begin, the Prince comes to learn the harsh truths of the political climate of his country, slavery, xenophobia on all sides, and both families scheming to win the games for the chance to control the government. The games end with a strange upset, and before the family has time to investigate, their enemies strike and the Prince is forced to flee the capital with his aunt. With his sister being controlled by the enemy, the Prince has to try to bring together various factions to form an army to protest the events concerning her marriage. This gets more complicated as the Prince must navigate between various factions who have allegiance to one of the two major political factions, groups who have years of grievances against the royal family, and even attempts by foreign powers to manipulate the war for their own purposes. More than any other entry, I feel like Suikoden V really embodies the complexity of war on a historical level far deeper than previous entries in the series. The plot actually unfolds very slowly and the story paragraph I gave you is a very very abridged version of just the first ten or so hours of the game. The title is a slow grind in the plot department, but it actually winds up being worth it in the end. Especially since a lot of this is to help establish several characters and factions you may not even meet again until 20 to 40 hours later. The cast of the game for the most part is pretty strong, almost as good as Suikoden IIIs and I love how the slow build actually makes some of the major plot twists before the game starts proper have more impact on you. The amount of depth and history that goes on in Falena is a bit more than usual for the series but it helps to make the conflict feel real, and the fact the game let's you really grow to care about the characters makes the tragedy that begins the war have more impact. If I'm going to nail the plot for anything, it would simply be that the villains start off strong and super competent before the take over, and then become incredibly incompetent afterwards, I mean it's like they were trying to piss off everyone after they took over which makes it easier to get the other factions to join your cause. I mean I know Highland kind of did the same thing in Suikoden II, but they were also being controlled by a bloodthristy psychopath who wanted to watch the whole world burn, whereas the villains of this game are more out for their own personal gain which makes their actions seem like political suicide. Also, Lucretia the Tactician is a bit of a Mary Tzu who is trying way too hard to be like Shu from SII without any of his fallable traits that make him a great tactician, but a horrible human being.
Gameplay-wise, Suikoden V is an amalgamation of several design elements from all the previous entries that combines all of their popular traits. After being missing in action for two numbered entries, V brings back a fully controllable six character party. The main battle system plays like a more fleshed out version of Suikoden II with characters having three possible rune slots. From Suikoden III, the game brings in a new Skill system that is partially better balanced in some way, but still pretty powerful. Characters now only have two skill slots in which they can equip a skill that raises their stats like Attack, Magic Defense, or Technique. You use skill points to level these skills to get better stat gains but you'll soon unlock skills that only take up one slot, but affect multiple stats as long as you've leveled the weaker skills to the appropriate level. This means that by end game you can have a character using both slots to give huge stat boosts across the board. Yet it also follows the smarter choices in SIII, in which there are some unique skills that only certain characters can learn and these skills can never be removed, and not all characters can learn all of these advanced skills. There is actually one skill that only the Prince and one other character can actually learn and the better warriors can learn the most advanced physical skills while the best mages can learn the best magic ones. So the game avoids making you teach everyone everything and becoming clones. From Suikoden IV, the armor sets have returned and thankfully don't require the insane levels of crafting and item farming that made them a pain to acquire in that title. New to the game is party formations, where you can change the party formation to gain stat bonuses but also to gain a special ability that can be used once in battle. These range from special attacks that can wipe out enemies, to special defensive bonuses that block all magic for a round, to even letting the party get a preemptive strike on enemies. With the huge cast and customization options offered, this is a pretty fun game to play around with party configurations. Unite attacks are still here and thankfully the game avoids the earlier games habits of handing you some overpowered party wiping one ridiculously early, so battles don't become quite the chore. If I had to be honest though, SV is hands down the easiest game in the series barring collecting the characters. There are so many broken characters in this game that one of the biggest treats about the final dungeon is that you get to make three parties, allowing you to use most of them. There is one character named Ernst, who has such a broken rune, that if you combine him with the Formation that gives you a preemptive strike, you can effectively beat every boss in the game once he joins without every getting hit, and you don't even need to resort to that rune because characters like Belcoot, the two Maximilian Knights, Richard, Viki, and Zerase are all game breakers in their own rights. Georg Prime is so overpowered that not only is he usually taken out of your party for large chunks of the game for plot reasons, but even with the fact one of his skill slots is permanently filled with a non-combat skill he is still game breaker enough that the devs won't let you use him for the final battle until NG+. I didn't really understand until I watched the guy activate two of his special unique abilities and his runes special skill, only to proceed in battle by one-shotting the boss and cause five digit damage, in a series where doing 2500 damage is enough to call you overpowered. So yeah...On the flip side, Duels have been overhauled. They retain the same setup as the previous game but now have a timer forcing you to make more quick decisions. Like the previous games, the duels utilize motion capture but have more of a wir-fu quality to them. The Prince is a pretty brutal fighter I might add. My favorite new addition is the War Battles, which work like Suikoden II where you build calvary, infantry, or mage units, but now expanded with water battles involving ramming ships, archery ships, and troop ships. It now uses the rock/paper/scissors approach to damage algorithms over whatever moon;ogic algorithms SII was using, and the battles are all Real Time Strategy so you have to stay on your toes so you don't get outflanked and watch your troops get slaughtered. This is easily my favorite war battle system in the series and offer some of the biggest gameplay challenges in the game. Well until you learn that the Beavers are the Navy SEALS of all aquatic battles. Another, and often underappreciated element I liked about the game was that it continued to utilize a trandiotnal world map/town/dungeon set-up which was being really fazed out around this time as games were transitioning to more realistic scaled maps. In fact, with the exception of maybe a few obscure RPG titles here and there, I have a hard time thinking of another RPG on the PS2 released after 2006 that had a classic world map.
Of course the real challenge of these games isn't combat or dungeon crawling, it's acquiring all of the 108 Stars of Destiny and SV might be one of the most difficult. Part of this is due to the fact that several characters actually have multiple methods to get them to join and the easiest solutions are often the easiest to screw up. Oboro the Detective is a good example. You need to hire him in the early game to investigate the Barows family and their connection to the Lordlake Rebellion, You're told to hire him and then go home, but if you travel to a certain town, you can team up with Oboro to help him with the investigation. Doing so allows you to recruit him at the first possible chance you can offer him. If you missed this, you have to ask him after every major story event and hope the RNG let's him, otherwise you have to wait until almost the end of the game and since he's the character you use to find the other characters and learn background information, you want him ASAP. Another character involves winning a war battle with overwhelming victory and then asking him while you have young cute girls in your party cause he's kind of a lech.If you don't, he won't join until your over halfway through the game and he feels you have a chance of winning the war. So yeah, it gets really challenging without a guide to recruit everyone.It's kind of interesting how similar this game is to another game on this list, Final Fantasy IX. Both games actually started off as Gaiden games and then got turned into numbered entries. Both games were also designed with the intention of being a celebration of the series with numerous shout outs and fan service to the series. Both games are also criticized for awful load times. Sadly, Suikoden V could not escape the series various curses such as low production values which get annoying when you realize the same company makes Silent Hill and Metal Gear Sold. The other curse being the games always being released around the same time of a more high profile and generally better produced game by Square-Enix. Suikoden II was released the same month as FFVIII, Suikoden III was released just a few months before the hotly anticipated FFX, SIV missed holiday and was released after DQVIII, an SV was released the same smurfing week in the States as Kingdom Hearts II. None of this is helped by the fact the series rarely got much advertising from Konami, permanently pigeonholing the franchise into cult status. It's a real shame because after the lackluster SIV, V turned out to be a fine addition to the franchise despite the handicaps but it was too late and it remains the last installment of the major story arc the series had been building up until this point. Still, if you're franchise is going to go out, I like the fact Suikoden V ends it with abang before the inevitable whimper of the gaiden titles. Although the game is kind of hard to come by now, I honestly feel it's a pretty good gateway entry into the series, though you will miss half of the references to the franchise.
Coming Up Next: Some mountains are scaled, others are slain...
Oh my god I know what's coming. :squee:
I love Suikoden V :jess:
I was starting to write a much longer reply, but I realized almost all non-WK posts (including mine) are fairly brief... except when I responded to your last Suikoden game on this list. I get a little passionate about this series. :shobon:
Suikoden V is a great game, and I get why people place it above S3. But I tend to like S3 a hair more due to a more engaging cast of main characters, and S5 is not enough more polished to compensate. But it does have one of the best traditional world maps; I'm not sure I can think of another game where the map just felt quite as big to explore.
12. So when I was reevaluating my thoughts on Ico, I remembered I had the HD edition on PS3 and I was having such a fun time going through the game I decided that a new playthrough of Shadow of the Colossus was in order. It never moved on my list, but it was still great to reaffirm for myself why I placed it so high. his is such a unique and interesting title, that despite some of it's flaws, just wins you over by the experience it gives you.Shadow of the Colossus is the story of a man named Wander who travels to the Forbidden Lands with his horse Agro and the corpse of the woman he loves. He travels to these lands to bargain with an ancient entity sealed there in order to bring his love back to life. The entity says its within it's power but will come at a high price of which Wander agrees. At this point Wander is tasked with slaying sixteen Colossi that wander the land in order to free the entity. Armed with a simple bow and a magic sword, Wander travels across the time stopped lands with Agro to hunt these great behemoths.In true Team Ico fashion, there isn't much left to say about the plot because it's pretty minimalist like Ico was. In fact, there isn't even a lot of evidence to say the girl you're trying to resurrect even returns Wanders feeling towards him. You can imagine him as a creepy stalker or heartbroken hero, it's up to you to decide. The gameplay itself follows this minimalist approach as the Forbidden Lands are a huge landscape to traverse, with several out of the way locations, that are filled with very little outside of the Sixteen Colossi. Yet I must commend the developers because in addition to the world being quite gorgeous to look at, this less is more approach does translate well as simply finding a gorgeous view or out of the way tree with fruit is pretty rewarding in itself. I appreciate the fact the game lets you explore as much as you want and doesn't necessarily feel obligated to bog you down with chores to do. Course the main event here are the Colossi themselves. They have often been described as sixteen boss battles but only a handful truly deserve that moniker whereas the majority of them are simply action platforming puzzles that resist your efforts to solve them. The Colossi exhibit different behaviors that range from aggressive, to curious, to indifference. These quirks create their own challenges and memorable elements for each of the Colossi and trying to find your way to each of their Glowing Glyphs to strike them down can bring with them their own amusing brain twisters. That's kind of what ultimately sets this game apart from other games. I mean MGS and Zelda have puzzle bosses as well, but most of them are fairly simple in practice with several tools at your disposal. SotC on the other hand gives you only the most basic tools and instructions to solve their riddles and it takes observing the landscape and the nature of the beasts themselves to figure it out. Before I played this game for myself, I was watching a friend go through it and he got to the Turtle boss in the Geyser fields. For the life of him, he couldn't figure out how to get on them until I suggested he lure it over to one of the geysers to see if it will knock him off balance. Sure enough, that was the first step to beating the beast and it was such an organic and well thought out puzzle that it has stayed with me for quite awhile. Another thing that has stuck with me about this game was a review I read where the reviewer mentioned they didn't finish the game. Not because it was hard, but because they felt too guilty about what they were doing. For anyone who has played the game will know, beating the Colossi does not give you some triumphant victory theme, instead you're greeted by more somber pieces depicting the death of an a ancient and sacred creature that will never be seen again. The black tentacles are also a dead giveaway, but I was pretty struck by the idea of a game that could move a person to feel that way. Like Ico before it, Shadow of the Colossi tells a tragic and moving story with little words and context but rather with feelings itself, which is something I feel games try to strive for, but mostly fail to do so well. Largely because they tell you what to feel whereas this title and Ico sort of bring it out of the player more naturally.I don't really know what else to say here, like Ico and Journey before it, this game is more an experience than a game, though the dev team could have made the controls a bit less clunky, so it's hard to really put into words what this game is about and why you should play it, other than that I feel the title embodies what gaming allows us to do. To explore a land, chase down a flying monster that requires a precise jump from your horse to reach and then a climatic struggle to slay the beast in order for the game to instill with you a deep sadness that makes the feat a hollow victory. Yeah, I just might leave it at that.
Coming Up next: Genes exist to pass down our hopes and dreams for the future through our children. Living is a link to the future. That's how all life works. Loving each other, teaching each other... that's how we can change the world. I finally realized it. The true meaning of life...
Shadow of the Colossus has a comfortable place in my top five games of all time. I find my thoughts wandering to it occasionally in everyday life. It's probably left more of a mark than any game I've played.
I admire SoTC for its uniqueness and how it conveys its emotion but it was just an average game for me.
I'm going through my top 100 right now and I wonder if you had the same experience I am having, Wolfy. I found the top 30 or so surprisingly easy to rank. The next 50 were fairly easy to identify but I'm finding it very difficult and arbitrary to rank them. And now I have about 100 games I need widdle down into the final 20, which I'm finding almost impossible.
That's pretty much how it worked out for me, and once you start writing about your thoughts on them, the order will start shifting as well. The first twenty or so were pretty easy, as was the next thirty or so.Quote:
Originally Posted by Del Murder
11.A game I'm sure most of you thought was going to be in my Top Ten, but just got squeaked out for a number of reasons, though it does regularly switch with number ten on my list. The biggest issue is simply that I just don't feel like the gameplay has aged quite as well as I had hoped. The level design combined with the simple enemy A.I. makes stealth pretty easy, I find the auto-aim to be more annoying than helpful, and jumping off from that point, battles that require actual non-first person view combat or setting traps are generally more annoying than fun. I love the cool gimmicks going on with Psycho Mantis, but it doesn't change the fact the fight is a total chore. So with the very few negatives out of the way, let's discuss why this game is so goddamn amazing. Set several years after Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake, Snake has retired from FOXHOUND and the military after suffering PTSD and still reeling from having to kill his only friend and his supposed father. Snake is captured by the U.S. Military and talked into doing one last mission for his country. A weapon disposal facility on Shadow Moses Island has been taken over by FOXHOUND itself. Hostages include the DARPA Chief, and the head of a weapons development firm ArmsTech. It doesn't take long for Snake to realize that the disposal facility was really just a front for several government Black Projects and Snake is once again dealing with a new model of Metal Gear. What follows is a personal story of Snake trying to overcome his past and realizing that no matter what he does, war is a part of his life. The plot twists and turns until Snake soon discovers that he may truly be on his own as his own allies have their own motives and secret agendas, not to mention Snake has to do battle with the most iconic and well loved group of villains in the series. There is also a strange Cybernetic Ninja that seems to be familiar with Snake...I feel what separates MGS1 from the rest of the series with only one or two exceptions is that if you peel off the more supernatural/Sci-Fi elements from the story like FOXHOUND and Metal Gear, the plot overall hits that nice sweet spot for spy thrillers where the whole scenario feels plausible. A government showing the world a face that wants peace, while secretly double downing on their weapon projects to eventually give them an edge over everyone else. Granted the plot was more impactful in the late 90s when the world was still leery about the changing of the global power structure, I think today, most people would find the premise of the plot a bit redundant since U.S. influence is still dominating largely because of our military might. Yet the game touches on larger issues about nuclear weapons in the modern age. From discussion of their devastating impact, to the rather slow and clumsy disarmament efforts, to the fact that despite a nuclear holocaust being averted the threat of a nuclear weapon being used has become more likely now that the technology has fallen into the hands of terrorist or rogue nations.I blame Neon Genesis Evangelion and a few other series at the time, but Japan had a weird fad in the late 90s concerning stories that delved into identity and existentialism. I think Vagrant Story might have been the last game to really delve into it but games like Silent Hill, Final Fantasy VII, and most of all Metal Gear Solid really explored this notion of who we are. MGS differs from the pack by blending the usual philosophical connotations of the subject by combining it with some science. Granted, it's a well known fact that Kojima's team didn't do their homework concerning how genes actually work but the concept still works in the greater intellectual discussion concerning nature vs. nurture. Is it out genes and parentage that make us who we are, or does our environment play more of factor? Will even knowing this truth set us free from the struggles of wanting to know who we are. The character of Naomi is haunted by these thoughts, and while Snake rarely says anything on the matter, his dialogue with several characters especially FOXHOUND plays into this larger theme as well. Snake sees himself as a broken ace and a victim of war, but secretly knows that war and fighting are not only the only things he enjoys, but the only things that give him meaning and this is something he will struggle with for most of the series but this game begins Snakes journey to find deeper meaning for himself and to not be bound by his past or heritage. To have a game that really tackled these complex themes and scenarios would have alone been enough to make this game stand out from it's peers at the time but MGS also pushed the gaming medium as well. I've already pushed forward the idea that MGS used MG2 as a template for most of the scenario and a few returning themes here and there, but MGS takes advantage of what 3D animation can do to finally allow Kojima and his team to create a game that almost feels like a film. While Kojima had played around with fourth wall breaking concepts in his previous titles, none have been quite as iconic or jaw dropping as some of the stuff he did in MGS1 with Psycho Mantis or bringing back the "find the solution on the back of the actual game box" puzzle which I had accidentally stumbled upon on my first playthrough. I didn't use a guide, I simply remembered the box had shown the codec number and felt I was "cheating" the game out of solving the puzzle when in actuality, I was just too simple to realize that was the solution. It's a combination of these elements that really show off how clever the design team was and instilled in a generation of gamers how gaming was finally leveling up to whole new era, and sadly I just don't feel like any generation afterwards has really thrown the gauntlet down like MGS and several other titles of the PS1 generation did. Despite the laughable polygon models and graphics, the PS1 original will always be the iconic MGS experience as I felt the dirty graphics and blue and green filters really added a visual style to it that later entries and the Gamecube remake just simply couldn't match up to. It added a grittiness to the world that is as iconic to it as cardboard boxes and Snake's headband. So despite the aging graphics, I still find the original the most aesthetically pleasing if that makes any sense. The soundtrack is also quite iconic and up until MGSV, was one of my favorite in the franchise. The Gaelic singing adds a sad eeriness to the setting and the rest of the music hits all the right marks to make this game feel like a film adaption of a Tom Clancy thriller. As much as I did enjoy MGS2, I feel like most of us would agree that MGS1 was a really tough act to follow. Another factor I will give this game is it's iconic cast. Cold-hearted killer Snake, the adorkable Otacon, Snake's reluctant former commander Campbell, sexy and mentally distraught Naomi, perky Mei Ling, green horn Meryl, hardboiled Natasha, and wise Miller. Not to mention FOXHOUND itself which set such a high standard for MGS villains that no entry has ever been able to match both their iconic characterizations and ingenious boss battles. I mean some of the most memorable moments of the game are the final moments with Psycho Mantis, Sniper Wolf, and Vulcan Raven. Even the Cyborg Ninja has been so iconic that Frank Jaeger's character has retroactively been retcon into always having a Ninja fetish and later games have ham-fisted the character archetype for the sake of the fans. Liquid, man Liquid was so popular even Kojima was surprised and kept getting more and more parts for the series despite being killed in his initial game. I feel it's safe to say the cast of this game hit it out of the ball park and has never been recreated as well since. Also Metal Gear Rex is easily the best Metal Gear in the franchise. It's design is the most iconic but I have to hand it to the game for making it feel like you're fighting a realistic robot as well as opposed to the physics defying "Minski Particle" variants that appear in every entry after it. It's amusing to play MGS1 and get a sense of trying to make Rex feel like he's a real thing you could see in the world, and then jump to MGSV it's Metal Gear feels like it was from Zone of the Enders. I don't know, it's hard to discuss this game because so many people have already analyzed the hell out of it. If video games had a teaching manual, a whole chapter could be dedicated to this game alone if not a whole book. If you have not played this classic, you owe it to yourself to do so. It might be as impressive as it was in 98, but I've seen people still blown away by it so what do I know. Anyone, check out the game that took a small one-note series and transformed in into a massive franchise that people still talk about today.
Coming Up Next: Tis your birth and faith that wrong you... not I.
I always wonder where I'd place MGS on my list of top 100 games. It'd be top twenty for sure. It broke so much ground.
MGS will always be one of my favorite games.
Ooh, the top 10 coming up! I can guess at least 2 games on it without thinking. Probably more if I reviewed your list and extrapolated.
EDIT: A 10 second breeze through your list and I think I confidently know 2 others.
EDIT2: Just figured out another one, unless you are throwing us a big curveball here.
EDIT3: I now speculate another two. Basically I'm going on the fact that you like some particular series yet haven't even named their best entries yet. 7/10
blame yourself or the next game
http://home.eyesonff.com/showthread....=1#post3534827
His influence has effected me forever.
A quick glance got me to 5 fairly confidently, with a possible 6th uncertain. I'm not sure I can get to 7, though I also know very little about WK's taste in non-JRPGs (and all but one of my 6 guesses are JRPGs).Quote:
Originally Posted by Del Murder
EDIT: Hah, just thought of two more guesses, though only guesses. As far as my 3 guesses though, I probably wouldn't have originally picked them for your top 10, and am mostly guessing them just because I'd otherwise be a little surprised they're not somewhere in your top 100.
Only one of my 7 guesses is not a JRPG.
EDIT: OK, I am up to 9/10, possibly 10/10.
Quote:
Originally Posted by RaistlinA quick glance got me to 5 fairly confidently, with a possible 6th uncertain. I'm not sure I can get to 7, though I also know very little about WK's taste in non-JRPGs (and all but one of my 6 guesses are JRPGs).Quote:
Originally Posted by Del Murder
EDIT: Hah, just thought of two more guesses, though only guesses. As far as my 3 guesses though, I probably wouldn't have originally picked them for your top 10, and am mostly guessing them just because I'd otherwise be a little surprised they're not somewhere in your top 100.
You two will have to start a betting pool to see if you guessed them. I feel my top ten is pretty easy to guess if you know what I've listed as some of my favorite games before. I think only two of them might be hard to figure out as one of them is a game I talk about a lot but doesn't get a whole lot of attention on the forum and the other one I've only talked about a handful of times.Quote:
Originally Posted by Del Murder
I will say right now that I did cheat with one of them but it will hopefully make sense when I get to that entry.
Only three of my entries are not JRPGs and that depends on how you feel about the third entry.
The oldest entry in the top ten will be turning thirty next year, the youngest entry is about eleven years old now. Only four entries were not made in the nineties.
The list is comprised of games made by only five companies. Two of which, made six of the listed games. Two of the companies only made one and the rest were made by the last.
I'll put my guesses under spoiler tags. Purely for bragging rights, others should post their guesses before looking at anyone else's.
(SPOILER)
These I'm pretty confident about being on the list:
FFVI
FFT
Suikoden II
Chrono Trigger
Xenogears
These I think are pretty likely:
MGS 3
Zelda: Link to the Past (bumped this one up in confidence after WK's last post)
These I'm guessing only because I'd be surprised they're not somewhere in the top 100 otherwise given what I've read from WK and elsewhere:
Persona 3
SMT: Nocturne
Some Guilty Gear game given your love of fighters (a more random guess after racking my brain, because I wanted to include 10 and this would be a third non-RPG). I do not know the series at all so can't pick one, or maybe this is where you cheat and pick the series as a whole.
I'm also surprised Suikoden I is nowhere in the top 100, but I don't think it's in the top 10.
Other fan favorites that I'm willing to call as NOT going to be there: Ocarina of Time, FFVII.
In no particular order:
(SPOILER)
Final Fantasy VI
Chrono Trigger
Persona 3
Persona 4
The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past
Mega Man 2 - the 'turning 30 game', didn't have that on here until you gave that hint (dropped Zelda: OOT for it)
Xenogears
Suikoden 2
Metal Gear Solid 3 - this is the curveball, maybe you just didn't like it as much as the other MGS games
Final Fantasy VII - I can't remember if you hate VII or just like to critique it, so this is the shakiest of my guesses
Hmm, 70% overlap with Raistlin's list. I'm pretty sure he got one obvious one I didn't. :D
Yes, I'm a bit surprised you didn't mention the game that's going to be #10. :p
(SPOILER)I did not even think to look for what other Mega Man classics weren't already mentioned. I like Mega Man 2 as a "otherwise surprised it's not somewhere in the top 100" guess even before the turning 30 hint, which I completely neglected. I'm pretty confident this is on the list now.
10.My relationship with FFTactics has been a little strange the last decade or so. I blame a large part on it with my falling out with Tactical RPGs or as I like to think of them as useless time sinks. I kind of blame NIS and their Disgaea series for being so unapologetically frank about the nature of the genre which promotes endless grinding for diminishing rewards. In fact this revelation made it quite difficult to even finish War of the Lions, which I considered to be a sad state of affairs for me. How could a game that really opened my eyes in the late 90s now kind of bore me? I'm sure you're wondering why I'm starting my tenth favorite game of all time on a rather pessimistic note. Well ultimately I realized the issue was me and my troutty way of playing the game. I'd become so fixated on completion and grinding that I ultimately transformed what was once an engaging experience into a chore. That's not how this game is suppose to be played. Not endless grinding for skills I'm never going to use, not borking my levels to transform every story battle into a formality of my inevitable victory with mu overpowered party, not figuring out how to transform every battle into some level party experience. I got so munchkin with the genre that I kind of lost track with what made this game so special for me. Once I realized what I was doing, I was finally able to really embrace the game again the way I had before. Tactics is a game that combines a lot of things I love: A well developed Job Class system that gives me that perfect balance of customization while retaining specialization, a world and setting with historical context and allusions that intrigues my love of history, my fascination with astrology, and a story about people and the morally grey conflicts that humans often find themselves in. If I had to give one gripe with the plot it's the fact the Lucavi story arc ultimately takes over despite being far less interesting than the actual Lion War. I'm not sure what that really says about the writing, when demons running a church based on a false faith are masterminding a scheme to cause the war and bring back their world ending leader is somehow less interesting than a story about asshole nobles screwing everyone over for a short-lived taste of power. Perhaps it simply shows that I often appreciate a more humanistic story than a fantasy one. I think what ultimately draws me to FFTactics is the game's strong cast of characters, with special mention going to the two central characters of Delita and Ramza. As much of a despicable human being Algus is, I can at least understand where he is coming from. I don't agree of course but I appreciate the fact that a guy with such simple motivations can be such an interesting figure who really drives home Ramza's conflict in the first chapter of living up to his noble heritage. Wiegraf deserves special mention as he is ultimately a tragic figure who tried to do good and was ultimately corrupted after losing everything. I mean he begins the game as this disenfranchised soldier simply fighting for a cause to make the nobility to treat their common soldiers better and give them their due pay and he ends up losing almost everything as corruption within his own ranks and the death of his sister hang on his shoulders. To see him again as a Knight of the Church in the later chapters is actually a bit relieving until he finally succumbs to the power of the Zodiac Stones and becomes that one boss in the game, yet it's fitting that such a figure who had a profound effect on Ramza and vice versa would be one of the greatest obstacles to conquer in the game for the player. The Beoluve family itself is a rather gripping drama concerning patricide, regicide, and the hubris of living for a name instead of the people who make it up. I feel that's often a central theme that defines the differences between the ideology of Ramza and Delita. Delita is driven by a sense of justice for the good of all, but unlike Ramza, he loses sight of the human element in all of it to make it worthwhile. He saves Ivalice from a corrupt nobility out for itself but in doing so had to become the very thing he fought for leading his entire cause to be one of hypocrisy. Even his one true friend is nothing but a pawn to him and in the end, he winds up being hailed as a hero and king but his victory is ultimately hollow. For me, what ultimately makes his final words in the game's epilogue matter is the fact we can once again see a hint of the old Delita who was just as naive and idealistic as Ramza. If Delita was truly as cold-hearted as we are led to believe, then his final outcome would not end with him saying such a phrase with such remorse. It's here where I feel Matsuno truly shines with his writing as we witness the intellectual moral harshness of Ivalice and the knowledge that despite Delita's terrible actions, he is in the end freeing Ivalice from it's current perpetual quagmire of political conflict and bickering among the nobility at the cost of the commoners who are treated more like cattle than people. It's a bitter pill to swallow but one that has some resonance within the real world.Yet it's Ramza that is the heart of the whole matter. A soft-hearted noble who inherited his father's good nature and his brotherhood with Delita opening his eyes to the fact that your family name doesn't make you any better than those without one. It's interesting to watch the idealistic Ramza try his hardest to live up to his family name in the first chapter, even being rewarded for making heartless decisions once or twice despite the fact that each one gives Ramza more internal conflict. To watch the influences of Delita who is kind and equally as skilled as the high born lads Ramza travels with be treated unfairly while Algus, a disgrace noble's son try to properly educate Ramza on how nobles should be. Ultimately it leads to the death of one of them and the irreversible downward slide of the other, but Ramza continues to wrestle with his conflicting desire for justice in a world where justice means different things to people depending on whether they have a name or not. That is something we see ourselves in the real world as it often feels like those of more importance can get away with terrible crimes where those that cannot are often unfairly punished. Ramza doesn't awaken to justice here but instead spends the second chapter running away from his problems, only when he finds out that Delita is alive, learns of the Zodiac Stones, and finally conquers Gafgarion a possible future self Ramza may have become had he continued to run from his problems. Yet unlike a traditional hero story where the hero begins to win triumphantly once they conquer their spiritual journey, Ramza is instead tested and slowly loses everything but his sense of justice. His trouble only tempers his resolve and we watch as the young cadet who did as he was told and int he shadow of his brothers rose to be not only to have an unstoppable resolve but prove he was the one who truly inherited the spirit of his father. It's interesting how Delita's journey is one of material gain at the cost of his soul, while Ramza's is a spiritual journey where he must discard the earthly desires that hold him down. It's incredible elegant in it's execution and I feel it leaves a much more profound lasting feeling after the credits roll and Delita utters his final lines. It is ultimately the games themes and characters that keep this game so special to me. In High School I began writing a novel with a friend and we decided to make it a trilogy, though in the Final Fantasy sense of similar themes but each story taking place in different settings and with a new cast. Our initial novel was heavily inspired by the various media we were consuming at the time and even began it's life as a sort of FF fanfic. The second novel though was planned to be largely inspired by FFTactics, including the story having two protagonist of similar nature on opposite paths in life. We never finished the first novel, I'm still currently writing it and it's currently on it's fourth draft, yet I still find myself wanting to write that second novel, especially when my thoughts dwell on FFTactics for too long and that might be what I love about this game the most, the fact it still inspires me to want to do something I truly love.
Coming Up next: In the beginning, there was Sword and Shield...
A worthy presence in any top 10. In my opinion, either the best or second best game to bear the Final Fantasy name.
An excellent write up on what makes FFT so great.
FFT is my personal top FF. I also 100% understand your "troutty way of playing," because a number of my playthroughs have stalled and been forgotten by me getting sidetracked with grinding rather than just enjoying the challenge and story. But it's a fantastic story, great characters, great job system. Terrible translation for the PS1 version, of course, though I still use the PS1's names and titles.
Also, Suikoden II all the way down at #9? Outrage! :wcanoe:
smurfing called it
edit:
unrelated but i used 'the zodiac brave story' by SQUARE as a reference when writing a high school essay on morality and ethics
my teacher must've been like 'what is this'