A product of infectious, childlike passion. FFIV implements the somewhat flawed but then-innovative ATB system, and unlike many of its successors, actually feels designed around it. Bosses take far more advantage of the system's unique affordances than later games do. Party members and their "gimmicks" are reasonably inventive and decently balanced.

The story feels like it was written by a child, but an exceptionally enthusiastic child with some great ideas. It frequently comes across as hokey, but at its heart carries splinters of meaningful maturity. It is the fertile garden from which FFVI would eventually bloom and supplant its progenitor in just about every way possible.

I always recommend that people play FFIV before FFVI if they have any intention of playing them all, because looking backward renders FFIV sophomoric and prototypical, but when its ideas are new, if not to the world than to the player, one can see how much of a revelation FFIV really was, and how much of the final form was already in this first draft.

Incredible for its time and still holding up well, but I can't in good conscience still call it the best of 2D Zelda. To do so would be to sell the likes of Link Between Worlds and the Oracle games a bit too short, and Link to the Past a bit too long. Its dungeons have cool ideas but haven't quite reached their final forms. The swing of Link's sword here has always felt somehow off to me. The implementation of the Dark World however has always felt right. It's a cheap and easy way to effectively double the explorable world, and finding ways between them is its own lovely navigational challenge. For better or for worse, Link to the Past began the redefinition of items in the Zelda franchise and with that redefinition brought both the potential of puzzles and the shackles linearity.

SMB3 was not a fluke. It was not an accident. Super Mario World is living prove that Nintendo could absolutely just do it again whenever they wanted. Super Mario World is only worse than SMB3 because it has too many ghost houses. That's it. It's beautiful and smooth and clever and whimsical and it has one of the best soundtracks of all time.

They did it again, and it BORED them. Nintendo stopped doing this because they'd already won. The only thing left to challenge them was a third dimension, and they'd soon demolish that too.

FF3 is in love with its job system and gimmicks just a touch too much. The game is so eager for the player to alter their party make-up to get around certain challenges that the player realistically ends up with little freedom to explore the systems on their own terms. The end of the game is a ludicrous gauntlet, and no matter how dishonorable you may find it, I strongly encourage you to use save-states. The final boss is a nonsense numbers check which all but requires a party exclusively made up of the two "secret" optional jobs, almost rendering it a "gimmick boss" like so many others in the game. FF3 is gorgeous and sounds incredible, as all of these games do, but rare is the day when I reach for FF3 instead of FF1 or FF5.