Phantasy Star IV for the Genesis is probably the quintessential JRPG I grew up playing. I got it around the same time as III, and I liked it more, but III had an interesting, if not well-implemented concept. It was also the last true Phantasy Star, before they moved on to moneygrab MMOs.
Agreed. Phantasy Star IV was definitely the best of the series. And way ahead of its time. Customizable combat macros? Completely optional trees of sidequests? Mixed single/dual weapon wielding? Static character-based storyline, but with a roster of characters you can swap out to/from the active party, with different characters required to bypass different areas, and unique dialogoe for events based on who you have with you? In game from the 90s?
Heartstring-yanking permadeath of a beloved, primary character?
Chrono trigger is the game I think most people tend to think of as the game of that genre that was "amazing" at that time, but Phantasy Star IV was better, in my opinion. I literally cried several times during that game. Though, to be fair, a lot of its emotional significance was tied to events from previous games. P4 had a lot of subtle references to previous games that would go completely over the head of anyone who hadn't played them. As someone who played the original Phantasy Star on the sega master system, my heart soared many times seeing Alis again. A well known and well-loved character who'd been
forgotton from a generation past, much like seeing Khan on the screen in Star Trek 2, after having seen the original Space Seed a generation prior. It's a thing you can't experience simply by watching it now for the first time. Too many games these days take characters you know and them keep rehashing them over and over. How many times have you played games with Samus? How many times have you played with Mario?
Imagine if there had only ever been
one Mario game, and then a decade later,
he unexpectedly came back to help you.
That's what Phantasy Star IV did.
Starcraft
Starcraft
one was, in my opinion, the best game ever made in its genre. I was pretty impressed with Warcraft 1. It was a nice a game. I got a lot of mileage playing Warcraft 2 via dialup. I've played Total Annihilation, Starcraft 2, Command and Conquer, Dune 2, Herzog Zwei, and others...but of all of them, Starcraft 1 was simply the best.
I absolutely loved Shadowrun for the SNES.
SNES? I played the Genesis version. And that was awesome. Highly recommended. Even now that game would still be pretty good.
Master of Orion , absolute masterpiece of 4X , the simplicity of its gameplay (it's only a few sliders by planets and research) and the gigantic replayability with an AI that can be a challenge, it was so great that i even play it from time to time nowadays.
If you mean Master of Orion
two, I would call it the best in the 4X genre, period. One was ok.
Oh, wow, almost forgot Descent.
Fun story: I was working at CompUSA back when Descent was released. Our store was visited by a vendor rep from Parallax. Apparently the version that was commercially released was significantly different from the test version. Apparently their player testers kept
throwing up during development, and it took them a long time to figure out how to keep that from happening.
As for the game itself, meh. It was a great idea. It was novel. But personally, I thought it utterly failed to be
fun.
Might & Magic 8 and 6.
I have very fond memories of the Might and Magic series. It's difficult to choose a best. I think I had the most fun with the Clouds/Xeen combo. Absolutely novel: two entirely separate games completely playable on their own, but
if you install them both, you can freely move your characters back and forth between the two games. And not via a complicated import process. "Clouds" and "Darkside" were each considered partof the same planet, and
seamlessly within the game you could move freely between the different towns and regions of the different games and do them in any order. Complete with quests that involved going back and forth between the two and an overarching plotline and "real ending" that required you to beat both games. Absolutely awesome.
But, for all of that, the game itself was not particularly remarkable. Don't get me wrong. It was a very good game. It was well made. It had very low frustration value. It was pretty. It had some amusing story twists. There wasn't really anything wrong with it. But apart from the "worlds" aspect, I have a difficult time thinking of anything genuinely
new about the game. It was towards the end of the first person turn-based dungeon crawler era, and it was definitely a highly refined implementation of that kind of game. But, of course it was. Because it happened at the end of its era.
The other strong contender for "best of Might and Magic" was Mandate of Heaven. Unlike Xeen, it was a first person
real time dungeon crawler, and it happened near the beginning of that genre. Not as early as...
Daggerfall, THE game that made me purchase my 1st PC, simple as that, i remember the excitement when i finally got my hands on the game box, and spent hundred of hours in it despite how repetitive the "random" dungeons actually were, probably the non-classic RPG i played the most.
...but suitably more refined. Daggerfall to me is kind of difficult to evaulate. It's a classic case of an early instance of a game in a genre being much better in some ways than it's successors. Daggerfall did some amazing things that other games many years later failed to replicate.
But
refined is not a good word to describe it. Yes, Daggerfall allowed you to play the bad guy. Yes, you could have houses and boats. Yes, the "flying" spell actaully allowe you to really fly around rather than merely avoid ground based traps. Yes it had dynamic quest and dungeon generation implemented in a way rarely seen since. Yes, the audio/visual
effects and scary ghost noises and random assassin's arrows that would loudly *thwack* into the building behind you were downright
terrifying if you played with the lights out. Yes you could completely customize your character in ways perhaps not seen before in any game, ever. Yes, you could play dress-up doll and dress up your character in dozens of different clothes styles with separate hats an shirts an pants an shoes in any of a bunch of different colors. yes, you could even toggle through and have your avatar tuck in her shirt or leave it hanging. Daggerfall had incredible customization, of spells, or magic items and character an class and paper doll...
But was it a "good" game?
Kind of no, not really. The main quest was
awful. Like,
really bad. And the game was buggy, nearly to the point of unplayability. If I recall correctly, the original unpatched version of the game was impossible to beat, because game bugs literally made it not possible to play through the game. And even after the final patch and limited edition update, the game was still horribly buggy and required judicious use of savefile backup fix utilities because it was possible to break your game in ways that wouldn't become apparent for dozens of hours.
But in a way, it was so bad that it didn't matter. Did anyone actually play through the main quest to completion? I got to the point that I was beginning to actually
know my way around Castle Necromoghan, and even I never came close to actually beating it. Seriously. And for those who don't understand that reference, Daggerfall dungeons are very probably the most complicated 3d dungeons of any game ever made on the history of planet earth, ever. By a significant order of magnitude. Even with the game's included 3d-interactive map viewer, even just
finding yourself on the map sometimes took minutes because of all the nested "maze of twisty little passages, all alike" sitting on top of each other.
The game is probably worth download and playing even if merely to experience the sheer awesome horror that were its dungeons.
But was the game itself "good?" That's difficult to say.
Author
Topic: Old games you loved (Read 5960 times)