Metagloria's 108 Greatest Games: A New Twist on the Traditional Best List!

[Pumpkin]

yay FFXII, Xenosaga II, and Pokemon Snap!!

[Ayen]

Ew, The Adventure of Link.

Yay Pokemon Snap and FFXII.

[metagloria]

Ew, The Adventure of Link.

Yay Pokemon Snap and FFXII.

You're gonna be disappointed, because I adore Zelda 2.

(Of course, I love FFXII more.)

[Egami]

Nice, XII is the awesomeness.

[metagloria]

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Tricky stuff going on here. I've pretty much mentally divided this into halves, so let's sift through them one at a time.

First, the RPGs. Let me go ahead and not surprise anyone by declaring Final Fantasy XII the immediate winner of this group. It's going to end up very high on this list, there's no mystery there. Of the remaining group, as I alluded to in the "marquee matchup", I think the closest contender is Rogue Galaxy, a thoroughly XII-like RPG that did an awful lot of things right. Sadly, one of the things it did wrong was exist on a dual-layer disc, making it impossible to complete in many PS2s – including mine. So, I'm judging a game I never even quite got to finish. And yet it's still an excellent game with all the things that make RPGs good – strong combat system, creative skill tree that uses items to fill out, diverse and explorable areas, solid story and characters. It's an underappreciated gem that should be considered among the best of its generation.

As much as I respect FFIII for what it did, massively expanding the class system from the original and allowing characters to switch classes, it's just not a game that's held up well over time, including in the DS remake (which is what I'm judging). It has its moments, but not nearly as many as other great RPGs. So it's going on the bottom of this pile.

That leaves The Last Remnant and Xenosaga Episode II to battle it out for the bronze medal among these RPGs, two games I've only finished one time. The first time I played Xe2, I got to a mech battle with Pilum and Scutum and couldn't win. I ended up quitting for many months before eventually restarting it and getting past that part (with some expanded knowledge of how mech piloting works). It's probably the weakest in the trilogy, though it does prominently feature the exceptional villain Albedo. In contrast, the first time I played The Last Remnant, I played it for probably 15-20 hours on a friend's Xbox 360 – and then discovered that I couldn't transfer that data to my own Xbox 360 because of idiotic profile locking. So I replayed the whole thing and loved every minute of it. There are very, very few games that I enjoyed more for the first 80% of the game that TLR. However, that game is severely marred in my memory because if you don't understand the underlying black box mechanics of party construction and progress, you can be severely unprepared for the endgame. There's no straightforward leveling; instead, the illusion of leveling comes in the form of "Battle Rank", but raising your Battle Rank is not always a good idea and may not at all make your party stronger. With the right build, you should be doing 100,000+ damage per turn toward the end. I was doing, um, about 15,000. I was still able to beat the game – barely – but taking on optional superbosses was a joke. Nevertheless, I can't discredit a game that entertained me that well too much.

On to the older titles. This was such a headache that I had to hash out my thoughts with a friend who's also a classic Mario, Zelda, etc. gamer. And we ended up pretty quickly settling on a perhaps-surprising conclusion: Super Metroid is by far the best game of this bunch. But before I lay out its merits, let me tell you a little bit about what Super Metroid means to me. As a young gamer, I purchased the strategy guide for Super Metroid and studied it intensely. Crateria, Brinstar, Norfair, Maridia...these areas captivated me with their mystery and complex, intertwined layouts. In an era when platformer games were all about stages, Super Metroid was a single, vibrant, interconnected world. Here's the catch: I bought the guide with owning Super Metroid...or a Super Nintendo. That's how good this game is.

Pokémon Snap is a fun game that sucks you in and can energize a late-night hangout, but it's over quickly, and it suffers from having only 63 of 151 Pokémon. To the bottom with it!

The truly challenging part is sifting through Super Mario Bros. 3 (THE classic video game), Mega Man 4 (the first Mega Buster title), and Zelda 2 (a totally unique action RPG that history, for some reason, does not smile on). I used to think Mega Man 4 was one of the more challenging NES Mega Man games, but that was back when I played all of them with Game Genie so I had a skewed concept of difficulty anyway. As it turns out, it's the one I played enough that I can pretty much tear through it on muscle memory now. It's fun, it has one of the best collections of robot masters, it has some really great stages, and it makes good use of Rush. I'm not sure where it'll end up on the Mega Man pantheon, but it's good enough to edge out SMB3 and Zelda 2 in a super tight race.

The final question: can I justify calling a maligned, misfit Zelda game better than Super Mario Bros. 3, a game with a legacy so huge I can't even think of proper adjectives to describe it? SMB3 is a massive Mario game, with like a hundred freaking stages over the standard eight worlds. It's pretty difficult later on, particularly if you're interested in completing every one of those stages. Of course, you can jump almost right to the end with the dual warp-whistle trick, but that kind of defeats the purpose, doesn't it? I'm not judging a speed run of the game, I'm judging the full game. And the full game is a challenging, drawn-out adventure that ends up somewhat bloated and overstays its welcome. It's not like this game has cape feathers; the raccoon suit and frog suit are fun for a minute, but wear out their welcome pretty quickly. In fact, one of the unfortunate consequences of the success of the New Super Mario Bros. games is that, by improving on the formula of the classics, they've made us all aware of exactly how much there was to be improved upon. SMB3 has a legacy because it was great in the early 90s, but it doesn't hold up now. Zelda 2, on the other hand, holds up incredibly well in part because its uniqueness has never been duplicated or polished. It's actually one of my favorite Zelda titles! It's got a cross between action platforming and RPG elements, with a world map and leveling up system. It's also insanely difficult, though some combination of state saves and/or infinite lives (not life) make it pretty tolerable. That level of challenge, while not inappropriate for an NES game, certainly holds Zelda 2 back from contending with other games in the franchise that it might be better than. But I'm going to step out on a limb and say it's better than SMB3. I surprise even myself...

FINAL RANKINGS: POD B

B1. Final Fantasy XII
B2. Super Metroid
B3. Mega Man 4
B4. Rogue Galaxy
B5. The Last Remnant
B6. Zelda II: The Adventure of Link
B7. Super Mario Bros. 3
B8. Xenosaga Episode II: Jenseits von Gut und Böse
B9. Final Fantasy III
B10. Pokémon Snap

[Loony BoB]

Saving FFIII for last is probably both a good and bad decision by me when it comes to completing the various FF's. xD

[metagloria]

Saving FFIII for last is probably both a good and bad decision by me when it comes to completing the various FF's. xD

It's a good game. It's just...it plays like Hard Mode FFV. Hehe.

[Pumpkin]

I'm glad FFXII did so well!

[metagloria]

Time to keep the fun rolling with Pod C!

Pod C.jpg

General Themes: A big-time FF showdown, a spinoff, a couple of other RPGs, one of a large puzzle series, and two of the greatest platformers ever. Don't know if there's anything to generalize, though.

Marquee Matchup: Definitely VI vs. X-2, with an opening act of Mega Man 3 vs. Sonic 2.

[Pumpkin]

I like several of those games

[Karifean]

Go, go, Final Fantasy X-2!

[Bolivar]

Loving this format!

Another good batch of titles but Sonic 2 stands out to me as the most significant.

[metagloria]

I inspired myself to start a new game of Pokémon Yellow because of this thread

...even though I'm still working on Dragon's Dogma and FF3.

[metagloria]

Sooooo I'm gonna finally put down my Game Boy Color long enough to write up this pod. Holy crap Pokémon Yellow is addictive.

Pod C.jpg

I'll save the FF series games for last. Let's start with the Professor Layton conversation. All five Professor Layton games that I've played (everything but Azran Legacy, which I own but haven't played yet) are on the list. Is that a bit much? Yeah, it does feel a bit screwy. But here's the thing: they're all the same dang game. Is any one of them good enough to be on the list? Yes. Therefore, how could I say Unwound Future deserves a spot but Diabolical Box doesn't when I can't remember anything that distinguishes them? The only substantive distinction between Professor Layton games is 1) the plotline, and 2) how many mandatory slide puzzles there are because ugh, slide puzzles. If memory serves – and it probably doesn't – Diabolical Box was the worst perpetrator of those offensive brain-melters. I seem to remember Unwound Future having a pretty good puzzle set and a very good story although the ending twist was a whole new level of ridiculous. (For those who know nothing about Layton, every game is based around a Sherlock Holmes-esque mystery where the plot is advanced by solving arbitrary puzzles and there's always a crazy reveal at the end.) Anyway, all that to say, there's a good chance that the five Layton titles wind up bunched between, like, 73 and 77 on my list, because as difficult as it is for me to tell them apart, it's going to be even harder for me to say that some random RPG is better than one Layton game but worse than another one.

Sticking in the realm of handheld gaming, we have the surprisingly robust Dragon Quest IX, a flagship title that found its way to the DS for some reason. This game has a unique trump card among all the games on this list, because while it is by no means the best RPG I've played, it holds my personal record for hours spent on a single playthrough at a staggering 178, which is almost 30 more than Skyrim. Think about that. I spent 20% more time grinding grottoes in a handheld game than I spent doing hundreds of quests in a massive, open-world console RPG. (Understandably, I have yet to play DQ9 a second time...) I actually got into RNG manipulation using some fancy websites and tools, something I've never bothered with on any other game before or since. And I didn't even do everything! There's a screenshot somewhere online of someone 100%-ing this game, and it took over seven hundred hours. What the. I just. No way dude. But I digress: the game itself is fantastic, the job system is really, REALLY well done, and it very well might be the best handheld RPG out there. It totally lives up to the Dragon Quest legacy.

Another RPG that might take hundreds of hours if you really wanted to do everything is Digimon World. I was a big Digimon fan during its run as a Saturday morning cartoon, so naturally I wanted this game to be awesome. It's actually extremely difficult if you play it normally, because your digimon live in a day cycle between 5 and 11 days, but you have to be training them so that they'll evolve properly, and you have to take them to the bathroom regularly, and feed them, and all that makes it difficult to ever actually go explore File Island. I eventually experienced a lot of the content of this game (and there is a lot!) using Gameshark. But it's slow-playing and doesn't feature a lot of music, which is kind of a downer. Good for nostalgia, but hard to recommend on its own merits.

Moving on to platformers, we have two absolute classics and one more modern entry. The latter is Jak & Daxter, which filled the void left when the Spyro team neglected to put out a good product for the PS2. It's made by the Crash Bandicoot people, and though I never played that series, their experience shines here. The lands are diverse and challenging, but not impossible (I did get every precursor orb on my second playthrough – with a strategy guide). Movement and combat are imperfect, but workable. (Also, literally while typing this paragraph, I remembered that Ty the Tasmanian Tiger exists, and that might have been just as good of a game.) Good game, nothing that special.

You want special? How about Magnet Man, Metal Sonic, and two eminently replayable games from hallowed franchises. Mega Man 3 is usually hailed as the peak of the series (or 2, for hardcore gamers who love difficulty). It brought Rush and Proto Man (here called Break Man) into our world. It had great stages, creative bosses, and perhaps the best Wily's Castle of any title. But it didn't yet have the mega buster. Sonic 2, on the other hand, was the first Sonic game to feature the spin dash. It also featured the lovable and iconic Miles "Tails" Prower, who strangles Rush in any showdown of sidekicks. It features one of the franchise's best songs (Chemical Plant Zone), the fantastic Casino Night zone, the monstrous Metropolis zone, and the epic Wing Fortress zone. To this day, if my friends and I are sitting around, at some point the idea of playing Sonic 2 will be floated – it might not happen, but it's always discussed. It has a level of timelessness that is hard to surpass. Mega Man will have its day, but Sonic and Tails take this round.

Lastly, let's set our eyes on Final Fantasy. (See what I did there? You guys see it, right?) You might be able to guess from my avatar and signature that I'm a X-2 fan. You just don't know how big a X-2 fan I really am. You guys, this game is almost perfect. The combat is the absolute best implementation of the ATB system, hands down; almost the best version of the job system; features simultaneous player and enemy action; breaks the mold of having characters on one side and enemies on another; and is just plain fun. Having the mythos of Spira already established by X allowed X-2 to do something incredible by using every area in every part of the game, be it for main story or supporting content, enabling a level of immersion no standalone title could possibly achieve. It's honestly an unfair advantage, something that only a sequel is capable of pulling off, and it is leveraged to excellent effect here. "Ugh, the game is too girly, and the plot is too light-hearted." I just think anyone who offers this half-butted argument has never seen all the Crimson Spheres or entered the Den of Woe. There are some goofy moments – like in, oh, every other FF title and most RPGs ever – but they are certainly balanced with heavy and emotional content. "Ugh, the soundtrack is J-Pop." Yeah, AWESOME J-POP. And not even half the tracks are full-on poppy tunes; there are plenty of brooding and melancholic offerings as well. In summary, I will hear no ill word spoken of X-2, and you will nod in agreement as I move it high up the list.

That leaves us to weigh VI against Crisis Core – a closer battle than some might imagine, but ultimately one decided by the flaws inherent in the excellent VII prequel. VI is far from perfect, but it is a main series game, which means it has a lot of things Crisis Core deviated from, such as an actual party, consistent leveling, and a world map. Crisis Core was a blast to play (and replay), and the missions were loads of fun. But the mediocre main story (up until the last few chapters and the ending, which is without question the greatest ending in ANY Final Fantasy game), repetitive combat, and being shuttled around between maps with lots of right angles ultimately derail this valiant attempt at extending the VII universe. I also didn't much care for Ishimoto's soundtrack, relative to most others, particularly the transcendent work of Uematsu on VI which is widely regarded as some of his best. I have no nostalgic attachment to VI, I think the graphics are pretty ugly (in every version – MAN this game screams for a legitimate remake), espers are worthless aside from being spell-teachers...there are plenty of flaws. But I couldn't rate the bungled-yet-entertaining Crisis Core above it.

FINAL RANKINGS: POD C

C1. Final Fantasy X-2
C2. Sonic the Hedgehog 2
C3. Mega Man 3
C4. Dragon Quest IX
C5. Final Fantasy VI
C6. Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII
C7. Jak & Daxter
C8. Professor Layton and the Unwound Future
C9. Digimon World

[Loony BoB]

Someday. Someday, I'll play FFX-2.