DeviousJinjo
1987
A rough diamond. FF1 is simple, charming, and very buggy. Definitely has some grinding, but less so than most other NES RPGs. Blank-slate party creation gives it more of a DnD feel and lends a level of personalization that Dragon Quest lacked. FF1 also features a less generic setting, and a more ambitious story, especially for its time. I'm certainly partial to it, and it has a certain flavor that the series would soon forsake. It's my favorite of the famicom trilogy by a wide margin.
1997
GoldenEye is so goddamned important you guys. This game invented the local multiplayer FPS outside of LAN parties, which sounds like a super specific niche thing, but this game pretty much led directly to Halo, which led to Call of Duty, which led to the world we're in now. The multiplayer alone earns GoldenEye a high rating, but the campaign is great too. Unfortunately time has not been kind to it.
Xenosaga is so far up its own ass that it has formed a perfect circle. This is a 40 hour long game in which almost nothing happens. At the game's end the plot has barely moved from the starting line despite having seven hours of cutscenes. Combat is tedious, character progression is unremarkable, and there's really nothing to see here except the story, which you can maybe start to appreciate after playing two more games, studying the intricacies of Jungian psychology, and becoming a doctor of Judeo-christian theology. What? You haven't read the Kabbalah? What are you some kind of idiot?
Perhaps the last of the great pureblood 3D collectathon platformers. Ratchet and Sly don't count.
2002
It's not Spiderman 2.
Single-handedly keeping RTS alive for another full decade.
2016
Last Guardian has cool ideas but is ultimately just an exercise in frustration. It's not just a matter of Trico's A.I. being purposely uncooperative. He has to be positioned absolutely perfectly in order to obey most commands, and dealing with that finicky design gets old very, very quickly. The story isn't prominent enough or charming enough to outweigh how maddening the gameplay can be.
2000
Three answers is a lot of them to have for a question that you've only been asked once or twice.
In the elusive scenario wherein someone actually asks me which among the Final Fantasy games is my favorite, my first answer might be Final Fantasy VII, as it was my first and it's the one I've played the most. I have read several terrible novels and played numerous bad spinoff games to 100% completion because of my love for Final Fantasy VII. I might then correct myself to my most practiced answer: Final Fantasy X. It is my firm and solemn belief, after all, that Final Fantasy X is The Best One for a litany of well-considered reasons, and I find myself with a ravenous hunger for it at least once per year.
Ask me on my most honest days, however... in my tender darkness, when the mind is powerless to stop my heart, and I will tell you that my favorite is Final Fantasy IX.
Final Fantasy IX is the only one in which the ATB system Gets In The Way, and while I can dock a point for it, I will never be able to make myself care. Drag as they might, no battle in Final Fantasy IX can dampen my love. No, not even you end up queuing commands too far ahead and the battlefield changes in frustrating ways before your attack goes off. If it really bothers you so much, play on PC where there are mods to get around it. I truly do not think that it is enough to get in the way of having an incredible time with Final Fantasy IX.
I don't even want to talk about the story. If I have to explain to you why the story of Final Fantasy IX is good then you're not going to appreciate it anyway. Yes, it would be nice if Freya has one or two more spotlight scenes and Amarant wasn't such a transparently tropey Zidane foil, and it would be nice if trance were better integrated in ALL respects, but look... Final Fantasy IX is so good that it made me immune to Persona 3. It is the only game whose ending consistently forces me to cry.
If you like anything about anything Hironobu Sakaguchi has ever done and you haven't played FFIX, please just do it. He deserves that much.
In the elusive scenario wherein someone actually asks me which among the Final Fantasy games is my favorite, my first answer might be Final Fantasy VII, as it was my first and it's the one I've played the most. I have read several terrible novels and played numerous bad spinoff games to 100% completion because of my love for Final Fantasy VII. I might then correct myself to my most practiced answer: Final Fantasy X. It is my firm and solemn belief, after all, that Final Fantasy X is The Best One for a litany of well-considered reasons, and I find myself with a ravenous hunger for it at least once per year.
Ask me on my most honest days, however... in my tender darkness, when the mind is powerless to stop my heart, and I will tell you that my favorite is Final Fantasy IX.
Final Fantasy IX is the only one in which the ATB system Gets In The Way, and while I can dock a point for it, I will never be able to make myself care. Drag as they might, no battle in Final Fantasy IX can dampen my love. No, not even you end up queuing commands too far ahead and the battlefield changes in frustrating ways before your attack goes off. If it really bothers you so much, play on PC where there are mods to get around it. I truly do not think that it is enough to get in the way of having an incredible time with Final Fantasy IX.
I don't even want to talk about the story. If I have to explain to you why the story of Final Fantasy IX is good then you're not going to appreciate it anyway. Yes, it would be nice if Freya has one or two more spotlight scenes and Amarant wasn't such a transparently tropey Zidane foil, and it would be nice if trance were better integrated in ALL respects, but look... Final Fantasy IX is so good that it made me immune to Persona 3. It is the only game whose ending consistently forces me to cry.
If you like anything about anything Hironobu Sakaguchi has ever done and you haven't played FFIX, please just do it. He deserves that much.
If you're looking for a game that uses every possible feature of the DS to the fullest, here you go. You move Link with a stylus on the touch screen. You can't move him any other way. If that sounds awful to you well... yeah it kinda is. The player's hand ends up in the way of the screen that you need to see like, a lot. Dungeons are so straightforward that they become the game's Achilles Heel.
2007
IWBTG is hilariously cruel. Is it actually enjoyable to play? Well... sort of, but only for some. It's certainly a compelling challenge, but for most it's just too frustrating. It's at least worth looking at just for the joke value.
This was the perfect game for hanging at a friend's house... until one of you got to be Yoda or Darth Maul, while the other ended up with Leia or Han, and then your friendship was ruined.
1996
Having grown weary with owning the world, Miyamoto withdrew so that he could spend a few years creating another one. Mario 64 codified the public identity of the "video game" just as much as Super Mario Bros did in 1985, and just as Super Mario Bros 3 emasculated all pretenders, Super Mario 64 made Crash Bandicoot look like a visionless hack and made Bubsy look like an absolute fucking moron.
This time though, the frontiers were so unknown, so vast and unexplored, that not even Miyamoto and his hardened gang of murderers could pull it off flawlessly. Super Mario 64 has an infamously whiny, uncooperative camera by any modern standard, but I'm pretty sure that's entirely forgivable considering it invented the fucking thing. Even Jumping Flash just dodged the question by going first-person.
For a second time, Mario had not just tightened his grip on video games, he had remade them in his own image. 3D platformers made from the same mold would define the next two generations. Then and only then would video games begin to slip through the plumber's glovey hands.
This time though, the frontiers were so unknown, so vast and unexplored, that not even Miyamoto and his hardened gang of murderers could pull it off flawlessly. Super Mario 64 has an infamously whiny, uncooperative camera by any modern standard, but I'm pretty sure that's entirely forgivable considering it invented the fucking thing. Even Jumping Flash just dodged the question by going first-person.
For a second time, Mario had not just tightened his grip on video games, he had remade them in his own image. 3D platformers made from the same mold would define the next two generations. Then and only then would video games begin to slip through the plumber's glovey hands.
1989
Mike Haggar is going to punch every crime in Metro City until it is dead, and then he will piledrive its corpse. Not even one hundred Andre's The Giant will stop him. He will do this for you: The People, but also for him: The Man, because some got'dang bunch of hopped up poo-brained yahoos have done gone and made it all personal, and now they have'ta die. If you play as Cody then you are a freak and I do not wish to speak with you. Please forget my name and never contact me or my loved ones (Mike Haggar) again.
2000
I'm sorry dog, I just can't. I don't like having to change equipment for every boss. I don't like hitting enemies for 1 or 2 damage until my combo ramps up and I can start maybe hitting it for actual numbers. I don't like having everything come to a screeching halt every two seconds because somebody's casting a spell. I do not appreciate arbitrarily placed invisible traps that only exist to make me cast a slow-ass spell every time I walk into a room. None of the systems in this game give me any satisfaction or joy. Fiddling with inventory crap is almost universally my least favorite part of any game, and Vagrant Story perfectly represents to me the issues with difficulty in so many RPGs. Show up with the right gun and fire the silver bullet, or prepare for abject misery. The only choices are the right and the wrong, and even being right still feels like shit. In my experience, I have found defenders of Vagrant Story's gameplay to all be operating under the same misunderstanding. Something having depth or it being difficult to discover, does not actually make it fun. The complexity of Vagrant Story does not, in any way make it a more enjoyable experience for me to play. It just makes it even easier for me to have a miserable, god-awful time by entertaining any of the fifty thousand ways to play it "wrong." Even if you're doing Vagrant Story "right", it is so stop-and-start, so infuriatingly slow in each of the wrong ways, so loaded to bear with stupid block puzzles that even the game's fans don't seem to actually like, that I am adamantly convinced no teacher in the world can help me learn how to enjoy playing Vagrant Story.
The writing however, is something else entirely. As is typical of all these Ivalice games, it is stellar. The dialog here is immaculate and carries the same type of maturity present in Xenogears and Final Fantasy Tactics which is so uncharacteristic of the rest of the medium even today, but especially for in its time. The most impressive thing about this whole game though is the honest to god cinematography of its cutscenes. The introductory section is absolutely phenomenal and feels like a genuine feature film, in a way that not even Metal Gear Solid does. It's such a pity that I find it hard to enjoy playing through this even with a supercharged, action-replay powered character. Even when making the combat as painless as possible for me in this way, on a second playthrough, just trying to navigate and traverse Lea Monde is so fucking irritating to me that no amount of optimism can show me a good time. If I felt like being even more inflammatory, I could call Vagrant Story the worst metroidvania I've ever played, but even if every second of gameplay makes me wish I were dead, its writing and cutscenes absolutely demand my respect.
The writing however, is something else entirely. As is typical of all these Ivalice games, it is stellar. The dialog here is immaculate and carries the same type of maturity present in Xenogears and Final Fantasy Tactics which is so uncharacteristic of the rest of the medium even today, but especially for in its time. The most impressive thing about this whole game though is the honest to god cinematography of its cutscenes. The introductory section is absolutely phenomenal and feels like a genuine feature film, in a way that not even Metal Gear Solid does. It's such a pity that I find it hard to enjoy playing through this even with a supercharged, action-replay powered character. Even when making the combat as painless as possible for me in this way, on a second playthrough, just trying to navigate and traverse Lea Monde is so fucking irritating to me that no amount of optimism can show me a good time. If I felt like being even more inflammatory, I could call Vagrant Story the worst metroidvania I've ever played, but even if every second of gameplay makes me wish I were dead, its writing and cutscenes absolutely demand my respect.
1990
I first played F-Zero a few years ago on the SNES classic. I didn't expect to spend much time with it, but I was wrong, this game is dope. I am not generally a fan of these "2D" racing games, but this one really does pull it off.