for me part 2 was horrible but it's worth beating just so you can play part 3 wich is freaking awsome

Xenogears

Awesome!!! Who knows how long it'll take me to knockout all 3, getting back to my rpg roots lol

Great! Are there any rpg elements or just a shooter? I'm gonna play through regardless just curious. Sorry not tryin to hijack this thread.

The PSX era of RPGs were the strongest overall. They've really declined over the past couple of generations, but there was a considerable comback on PSP and DS. While there were some RPGs with strong stories in later generations; even the best fell short of the best of the PSX generation.

That said, Xenogears easily topped the PSX era of RPGs in terms of story, and is the best overall of any game.

That all said, I find it confusing that of all of the games available, some people said FF9. If anything, it was one of the most vanilla flavoured RPGs of the PSX era, even making Dragon Warrior 7 look spicy. I suppose if that's what you like...

I suspect that most people posting haven't completed more than 5-10 RPGs that aren't Final Fantasy.  As elitist as I sound, I really think people just haven't played very many RPGs.  Most started at a Final Fantasy, probably seven or later I'm guessing.

I own it, but it is pretty terrible.  I bought it because it had ff7 in the title, but i had to seriously push myself to play through it...

Suikoden II or Suikoden III are probably some of my all time favorites. Xenogears and Xenoblade are also up in my favorite of all time JRPGs.

Tomb Raider Legend, Anniversary, Max Payne, Max Payne 2, plenty of other shooters, it was a lot more enjoyable of a third person shooter to me.  Didn't really have to push myself to beat it.  Just controlled a lot better and more enjoyable to play through.  Maybe not as good as Resident Evil 4, but it's one of the better third person shooters on the system.  Worse than a lot of shooters on PC and this gen though.  Uncharted, Stranglehold, Quake, Unreal Tournament, Vanquish, etc.

Anyways, to Hurr1cane, yeah it has an RPG system to it.  Whenever completing a mission, depending on your rank you can either get gold or exp.  Do you want to level Vincent up to have more HP, MP, and defense or do you want gold to be able to purchase and upgrade the levels of your weapon parts, materia, and accessories.  As you progress through the game you'll have multiple different interchangeable parts for your gun and you have three slots to customize it, which the idea behind it is that your gun automatically changes to one of three types(kind of like how Barret's hand changes to the gun arm on Advent Children instead of being the gun arm permanently.)  So you can switch parts to make the guns get different range, power, rate of fire, and either machine gun, regular ammo, or rifle ammo.

*edit*

Will probably get a lot of people up in arms over the Max Payne comment in this post.  Decent game, but you might actually like Dirge of Cerberus if you play it without immediately thinking it sucks because of the critic reviews it got long ago because it's a Final Fantasy game and it's not an RPG.  I think this is the first non RPG Final Fantasy game unless you count Crystal Chronicles on the Gamecube which was an action RPG.

Final Fantasy VI has the best story.
P3 and P4 are awesome.
Both kingdom hearts and The world ends with you are must try.

Saying J-RPGs lack story is diminutive. Most revolve around their stories, the story is just not written the same way as a W-RPG. W-RPGs are all about the universe background, while J-RPGs are about the characters.