[quote]Iron Dwarf wrote:
- Get a life
- get a life
- get a life[/quote]
Damn you Iron Collins!
[quote]Iron Dwarf wrote:
- Get a life
- get a life
- get a life[/quote]
ID has meade me see the light, I’m going to give up video games and double my T-Nation posting. I’ll add to my current posting in things that interest/relate to me. I’ll venture into areas I dislike or am not intertested in and make fun of the people who find those things interesting.
V
curse of the azure bonds
pool of radiance
telengard
KotOR
Chrono Trigger
FFX
I can’t understand all these Philjapanese.
three top and mature rpgs:
the Witcher (buy the extended version), System Shock 2, Gothic 1+2
Planescape was also superb, if you have no problem to read content equal to five or six books.
If I have to include asian stuff, I settle with “Shining - the Holy Ark”.
- Chrono Trigger
- Baldurs Gate 2
- Fallout 2
Very honorable mentions: Planescape Torment, Mass Effect 2, Final Fantasy 7, Elder Scrolls Oblivion (modded).
I’m glad so many people have played Chrono Trigger. I loved that game, and it’s one of the few games that stands up when you play it through after the first time. That’s what I think a truly great RPG is.
Baldurs Gate 2 was epic, well written, and challenging while making you feel you could do whatever you wanted.
Fallout 1 & 2 are worth a play if you can bear the graphics. 2 is by far the better, but it builds on a lot of the story from 1. It was awesome to play an RPG where you could deal with things however you wanted; kill who you want, wander the wasteland, kick someone in the groin.
Oblivion is a way better game once you install a mod that removes the enemy scaling so it behaves like a normal rpg. It’s called Oscuro’s Oblivion Overhaul and it throws in some new content as well.
Planescape Torment is an interesting game. Like a novel length choose-your-own-adventure where the protagonist is an immortal amnesiac and his companions range from a disembodied skull to a fallen angel. Wasn’t quite polished enough to do it’s story justice though; things like the lack of map markings and missing out on a resurrection skill if you don’t read the manual. Still one of my all-time favourite games though. Baldurs Gate 2 just did everything it did, better.
I can’t exactly figure which are my tops but here are a few of my favorites.
FF7 for obvious reasons
KOTOR
Diablo (I and II)
Ogre Battle 64- also fucking awesome strategy RPG
and one that I have never ever seen mentioned:
Summoner. I fucking loved that game. It was one of the first RPGs I played where weapons/armor/item changes actually were reflected on your character. Plus the summons were awesome!
LOL Iron Dwarf
Just gonna name drop some games I’m surprised to not see yet, I have no idea what my actual list would be.
Seiken Densetsu 3(someone mentioned Secret of Mana[SD2], I thought SD3 was pretty much better in every way, which is crazy because SD2 was amazing itself).
Lufia 2(and 1)
Xenogears
Chrono Cross(way better than it gets credit for, IMO it catches too much undeserved flak because people wanted a true CT sequel[which I don’t disagree with, but it’s still amazing])
Vagrant Story
Soul Blazer(btw SSC it’s Illusion of Gaia, that’s the sequel to this game, and Terranigma is the sequel to that which is also a fantastic game worth playing)
Crystalis(rep the best NES RPG ever, sorry Zelda)
There’s a ton more that are probably worthy of honorable mentions but I don’t think I’d complain about seeing any of the above mentioned in top 3 lists, ESPECIALLY Sword of Mana and Lufia 2.
Edit: It’s good to see western RPGs get a lot of credit here too, I know I just basically named almost exclusively JRPGs but that’s because you guys covered ours so well(MAD PROPS to whoever named System Shock 2, baller fucking game).
- Final Fantasy 9- The astmosphere and sheer depth of the world hasn’t been beat yet
- Digimon World (1st one only) Same, huge and memorable environments, more memorable than any other game i’ve played the sections just pop into my head even years later
- Legacy of Goku 2- Win
Given that I’m a former games journalist who used to write the adventure and RPG column on my old magazine, I like to think I’m a bit of a connoisseur. The problem is that, after 20+ years of gaming, it’s really fricking hard to pick just three.
-
Baldur’s Gate series.
Baldur’s Gate came along at a time when everyone was making FPS and not much else. I was lucky enough to meet the guys who founded Bioware and preview Baldur’s Gate and it was like a breath of fresh air. I couldn’t describe how fucking happy I was to see this game appear. To me, it was the game that single-handedly rescued the RPG genre.
Then BG2 arrived and was even better. I have lost count of the times I have played through it - I tried it with every party combination, every character class and every romance, and that was before I started messing about with mods. I must have been through it something like 30 times. Awesome, awesome game. -
Fallout series
The first two have a really unique atmosphere. They look like crap, true, but the first one was a DOS game after all. Fallout 2 was awesome in that you could get involved in the Mafia, be a porn star or do pretty much what the hell you wanted. I’m really hoping New Vegas captures some of that old-style Fallout flavour.
I was somewhat concerned that Fallout 3 wouldn’t quite measure up but it’s an awesome game in its own right. The original ending (before Broken Steel was added) actually made me tear up. Any game that triggers that much of an emotional response is doing something right.
- Mass Effect
Fucking love these two games - they are both epic. I tend to think the first is a little more epic but the second has grown on me a lot. I must have played through ME 10-12 times and am currently on my fifth run through ME2. When I get a game, I content-mine the hell out of it. These days, if I only play a game once, there’s something wrong with it.
Honorable mentions:
Ultima VII: The Black Gate.
The Ultima series wasn’t just your standard fantasy crap - it was actually pretty philosophical. Ultima VII was an immense game with a very rich and colourful mythology behind it. The follow-up, Serpent Isle, was also great but at the same time, rather bleak and depressing, which is why I prefer the first one. (Ultima VIII, on the other hand, was a bag of shite - the new engine sucked dick. I remember describing Baldur’s Gate as the game Ultima VIII should have been. Which is about right).
Planescape: Torment
I’m really torn on this one. It’s quite possibly the best RPG ever. But on the other hand, it’s not a game I could play through more than a couple of times. It’s more a work of literature than a game - it’s very weird, very atmospheric and parts of it are very moving. The graphics are dated, yes, but if you haven’t played it, do so - it got reissued recently.
Elder Scrolls
Huge games, all of them. Morrowind was the first one I actually finished (back when I worked as a games journo, I didn’t have the luxury of finishing a lot of games - there was always another game I had to review. So Arena and Daggerfall, I just dabbled in).
Oblivion I’d have liked to have played more. I finished the main quest, started a new character and then started having massive fatal crash problems that made it impossible to play. It’s to my great annoyance that I never managed to finish the Assassin and Thief guild questlines.
Dragon Age
I actually love this game - I played through it 10 times before I had to put it down. I must admit I’m just waiting for them to patch the bloody thing (patch 1.03 was a disaster - I refuse to apply it, which means I can’t play Awakening yet). Again it has that level of emotional involvement I like from my games. A worthy successor to Baldur’s Gate (unlike Neverwinter Nights)
KotOR
I loved this game. Plus I have a big girly crush on Canderous.
KotOR 2 could have been even more epic but for the fact LucasArts made Obsidian rush it out before it was finished, so the last part of the game sucks balls. However, KotOR 2 has a really depressing atmosphere and I found playing it was too much of a downer. Three playthroughs were all I managed before I had to go back and play KotOR again to cheer myself up.
for traditional RPGS -
Final Fantasy 2, 3 and Mario RPG for SNES (bet most of you guys forgot about mario, it was actually a great game)
For the ones that dont follow turn based combat, the first Zelda for NES, as well as Secret of Mana and Zelda a link to the past were fantastic as well.
final fantasy 7 kind of marked the downfall for me as far as RPGs went - it insisted on itself and was insanely long, and with no way to bypass how long ‘ultimate weapon’ took to finish, it was too graphics heavy and trying to showboat too much, although the story line was legit.
oh man good call red04 on chrystalis - That game was the business.
I really havent played video games in a solid 10 years since i got a car and a job. i played and beat star ocean when i was sick as a dog when i was 20 because i heard that it was amazing. it was decent but i wasnt blown away.
I put about 3hrs into Fallout 3 last night b/c someone in another thread told me to give it a chance. Still hasn’t hooked me but we will see…
FYI fellows, the Zelda series have always been Adventure games short of Zelda II: Adventures of Link, which was a side scrolling action RPG.
Dragon Warrior
Final Fantasy 6
Diablo 2
Secret of Mana
Did anyone here play LEGEND OF DRAGOON? Man that was also a memorable game. Overly cheesy but still great!
Some fun old computer ones were Eye of the beholder. Lands of Lore. That was probably about the same time the first warcraft came out. And also even though they are really platformers, I think the megaman series and the metroid series delivered quite a bit of “fantasy roleplaying”
V
Not a fan of the genre, but:
- Mount & Blade - simple, beautiful and addictive. I actually had to uninstall after playing it for about a week, 'cause I started playing 8 hours a day
- Oblivion
- The Witcher EE, though I expected more from it.
FF7
Zelda
Wow (Somebody had to do it)