I got this game for Windows shortly after it came out, but my computer wasn’t strong enough to handle it. So I returned it and bough a bunch of You Don’t Know Jack games. Yeah.
Anyway, I eventually borrowed this game from a friend and the Playstation from my brother and fell completely in love with the game. I’m a sucker for anti-heroes, and Cloud was a perfect character to express my teen angst. I’ve fallen out of love with it a little bit over the years due to the poor graphics and the poor final chapter of the game. Continue reading 9. Final Fantasy VII→
This ranking is likely blasphemy to many who are reading. I know at least two people who would rank this game #1. And I have to admit, it’s just about as flawless as you can make an RPG. Proving how subjective these rankings can be, it only gets knocked down for me because despite playing it twice, I found the story and characters virtually unmemorable.
The final game in the Erdrick trilogy is easily the best one. While it suffers from the same thing as the first two games in the series (endless level-building), its story is epic and infinitely more interesting than the previous two games. Continue reading 11. Dragon Quest III→
I never finished Chrono Cross thanks due to a bug (either with the game or with my disc) that left me perpetually stuck in one area. I thought about not ranking this game, but from what I played, I know I would rank it at least this high. Perhaps if I finished it (which I won’t, I’m sure) it would rank higher. Regardless, it’s a nice follow-up to Chrono Trigger that excels in everything except that I never felt fully engaged with the story.
Developer: Square Publisher: Square Year: 1993 Platform: Game Boy
The third and final game in this series makes some significant improvements in game mechanics, making the game more user-friendly. It also has a time-travel plot, which should be golden. Unfortunately, a rather dull story weakens an otherwise solid game.
Developer: Square Publisher: Nintendo Year: 1996 Platform: SNES, Wii
A rare marriage by Square and Nintendo brought Mario and family to this genre for the first time. Released late in the SNES run, it successfully uses up every ounce of power the SNES has for its graphics, but unfortunately suffers from an aimless and uninspiring plot that eventually bored me into quitting.
The Lufia series was heavily overshadowed by Final Fantasy and Breath of Fire, so much so that I had never heard of it until the internet. I hoped I would find an overlooked gem, but sadly, Lufia’s relatively poor reception was deserved.
In 1990, America was still behind on the RPG front as this game took three years to get here from Japan. Final Fantasy took the same amount of the time to cross the pond and was released a few months before this game. That game probably hurt any momentum Enix hoped to gain with the Dragon Quest/Warrior series, especially since graphically Enix seemed to be way behind. Still, this is a solid, if not always memorable game.
The first RPG I was ever exposed to, and also one of the first America was exposed to. Considering it took three years for this classic to make it over from Japan, it’s obvious it took this side of the Pacific longer to warm up to gaming that didn’t involve hand-eye coordination. While the game is slow and painful at times by today’s standards, it has so much damn charm that the game can still worth playing today, especially the updated ports (packaged with Dragon Quest II) that fix several of the game’s issues, detailed below.
Death By Troggles 
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