Wolf Kanno's Bottom Ten JRPGs.

[Bolivar]

Wolf, you have such a beautiful voice!

Writing could use some work, though.

[Slothy]

I'm not a huge fan of FFXIII but there's zero chance it would be on this list if it didn't have Final Fantasy in the name.

Even ignoring the title, it is at the very least the worst RPG I played last generation. Which is impressive since there were some real stinkers I played. And it's more likely one of the worst RPG's I've ever played.

Multimillion dollar budgets, and relatively high production value will never be able to hide god awful gameplay and writing. If it were a game with half the budget made by a company other than Squenix and without the FF name, I think much fewer people would be defending it.

[Wolf Kanno]

Last entry will be up before the weekend is over and I'm probably not doing anything special for this one.

Hints:
It is the oldest entry on this list.
Most of you have probably never heard of it.
It had awful sequels on Sega platforms
It's a terrible port of a so-so PC game.

[Scotty_ffgamer]

I feel like I've heard of this game and that it's going to really bother me that I can't guess it based on the clues.

[Ayen]

Shadow of the Beast?

Wait, that's not a JRPG. Haha, I'm silly. Clues reminded me of that game though.

[Scotty_ffgamer]

I'm going to guess (probably incorrectly) that it might be Hydlide. I feel like this is wrong, but who knows. I'm pretty sure it's a bad game that was a port of a PC game. I also feel like it had sequels on the Genesis and Saturn.

[Skyblade]

I'm going to guess (probably incorrectly) that it might be Hydlide. I feel like this is wrong, but who knows. I'm pretty sure it's a bad game that was a port of a PC game. I also feel like it had sequels on the Genesis and Saturn.

But Virtual Hydlide for the Saturn was a remake, not a sequel...

[Wolf Kanno]

But Virtual Hydlide for the Saturn was a remake, not a sequel...

Well yeah, it would help if I got my facts straight. Didn't realize it was a remake until I looked it up. Hell I didn't realize it had a backwards save system until I popped it back in a week ago to double check I wasn't crazy about how awful it is.

I'm going to guess (probably incorrectly) that it might be Hydlide. I feel like this is wrong, but who knows. I'm pretty sure it's a bad game that was a port of a PC game. I also feel like it had sequels on the Genesis and Saturn.

You are correct.

#1 Hydlide
hydlide21.jpg

Originally I was thinking of doing one of those psyche out entries where I would say FFVII or some trout but frankly I don't care enough anymore to do it.

So number one is a game I doubt many of you have heard of and to go back to a discussion I had with Bolivar about how one comes to obtain bad games, I am partly wrong. It is true no one buys a bad game for themselves, but sometimes you do buy them for other people. This game was an odd Christmas present I received a number of years ago along with Seicross (which I doubt anyone has ever heard of) and Power Glove which is most famous for being the game that came with the Nintendo Power Glove peripheral which sadly I did not receive with this game.

This was easily my least favorite game on the NES that I actually owned, I think only the Uncanny X-Men game and the Back to the Future games come close to being worse than this title but I luckily don't own any of those games. Through the years it has remained one of my least favorite games with only a handful more actually joining that list but still the contempt simply grew.

Hydlide.jpg

Hydlide is an old Action-RPG for the MSX and the NEC-PC series of computers in Japan in 1984. The first game was ported to the Famicom and later the NES. It recieved two sequels for the MSX, the third entry was eventually ported to the Sega Mega Drive and retitled Super Hydlide, from what I've heard, this entry is actually pretty decent if a bit forgettable. Finally, as Skyblade pointed out, the first game was remade for the Sega Staurn as a 3D Action RPG and um yeah... It's probably one of the reasons why the Saturn failed outside of Japan. So what is so gosh darn awful about Hydlide? Well just about everything actually...

Imaging if the original Dragon Quest and the original Legend of Zelda had a child together. Not a bad idea on paper but let's also say the people designing this game didn't know jack what they were doing. Hydlide looks like a Zelda game in action except when Jim (yes that is the heroes name) attacks, instead of getting a visual of the sword attacking you simply see a box in the corner switch from Defend to Attack. The sprite remains the same and you have to be on top of enemies to hurt them. There is close to know real feedback on how you are doing besides watching the life bars and noticing how Jim is losing health like it was out of style while the enemy doesn't.

hydlide_screenshot.png

There are no healing items in the game, instead, Jim regenerates health very painfully slow by standing on grass completely still. If you were silly enough to stand still on the edge of the screen, an enemy can easily just spawn right next to Jim and murder him. I should point out that these stipulations also means that when you go exploring dungeons, Jim cannot heal unless you leave them and thus reset all the monsters, meaning dungeons and bosses have to be tackled in one setting.

Hydlide_NES_ScreenShot3.gif

To achieve this without dying, Jim gains levels by killing monsters, like DQ, this is a very long and drawn out process as it takes forever to gain the XP needed to get a level up and you need seriously leveling to not be murdered by the majority of creatures in the game. There are of course a couple of problems with this, the lack of feedback from combat mentioned above means you might get killed quickly if you're not paying constant vigilance and you need to kill A LOT of monster if you want to level up. The other issue is that once you've leveled up enough, less challenging monsters stop giving XP. They can still murder you pretty quickly if you are not paying attention but killing them is largely pointless after that point. Once you reach this point, it's time to play the wonderful game of randomly attacking every new monster to discover which ones you can beat and get XP from, and which ones will just flat out murder you. This part is surprisingly frustrating.

hydlide1-nes4.png

Jim, like Link, collects items as well that aid him on his quest. Unlike link, none of them show their value to you in a logical way. Did you know you need the Cross Item to even hurt the Vampire boss? All the item does is allow you to actually inflict damage on it, without you can't. Didn't know that and tried to fight him anyway? Sucks to be you, course some lucky players most likely found the item before they ever found the Vampire making this a moot issue but I feel this all really shows the issues with the games design. In fact probably one of the few decent things that came out of playing this game is understanding the absolutely brilliant design of games like Dragon Quest 1 and The Legend of Zelda because they have things like townspeople to drop hints, items that give immediate feedback (most of the time) and a world structure that slowly branches out that makes absolute sense. Hydlide is pure trial and error with excessive grinding and arbitrary item collection

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Now granted this game kind of predates Zelda and DQ, and normally I try to be more fair to older games where designers didn't really have any prior knowledge to go on and simply through ideas on a wall until something sticked. With that said, I feel I can still see this game for being as awful as it is simply because DQ and Zelda learned from this games clunky UI and design on how not to make a frustrating and ultimately poor game. They made the world branch out in a good pace which rewarded exploration or being daring to seek out the fringes of what was safe with better equipment to help expand the world. They had incredibly user-friendly interfaces that even a child could understand with both visual and audible feedback to tell you how you were doing; they made growing stronger much more rewarding and satisfying. Most importantly, they made the goals clearer and easier to understand by setting you up with simple objectives that when added up, create actual progress; instead of just endless wandering, with no direction, and constantly trying everything to see if something new might happen to make you feel like you're getting somewhere.

Play this game to understand where the genre has been and then be grateful. Don't come to me whining about how (insert relatively well known game) is the worst RPG you've played. Play this game and tell this is not one of the most frustrating, least rewarding, and terribly designed RPGs ever concocted.

With that said, you now know my Bottom Ten JRPGs I owned. I now bid you Eyes on Final Fantasy, Adieu.

[Scotty_ffgamer]

Oh! I was right. I was a little iffy on the sequels part, but I was pretty certain I had heard that we got sequels on Genesis and Saturn. I've never played Hydlide, though I've seen the cartridge at used game stores before. The only reason I even know about it is because of the Angry Video Game Nerd video about it (one of my friends and I watched through all of those one summer because we were bored). Anyways, it looks every bit as terrible as you describe. Someday I feel like playing it just so I can experience how terrible it is, but I'd rather play good games.

Super Hydlide actually looks like it did some interesting things though. I looked up the other games after I made my guess just to see if I was correct. I'm still not sure if I'd ever want to play it, but it's not the worst looking game I've seen. Also, it has a point where you are just walking in space, killing bad guys. Can't go wrong there.

Thanks for the entertaining list, Kanno! I enjoyed reading every bit of it, and it's always interesting seeing some contrarian views on more popular games.

[Pike]

I haven't played any of these games.

Well that was anticlimactic.

[Elpizo]

I've known of Hydlide since the Angry Video Game Nerd did a video on it. Didn't expect it to be your number one, though.

[Fynn]

I have not heard of this game either, but it was still a really enjoyable read.

Great list, Wolf, as was to be expected

[Pumpkin]

Awww its over now

Great list!

[Vyk]

I too only know of Hydlide thanks to AVGN, but I actually tried Super Hydlide. And it isn't a steaming pile like the first game. But it is also not really that good. I think when Ys came around and used the exact same fighting and leveling mechanics, and did it a thousand times better, they maybe learned their lesson and actually tried a little. Not very hard, but they tried just a little. Its actually kinda funny how GOOD Ys is, considering it too has you walking into monsters to kill them without any animations or anything

[Skyblade]

ProJared's awesome Hydlide reviews:





For those who didn't watch them all, let me point something out:

Virtual_Hydlide_Box_Art.jpg

Look at that box art. The bit right at the top. Published by ATLUS. Yes, that ATLUS. They only did the publishing in the West, but still...