Your Top 50 Games: 2012 Discussion Thread: FINISH YOUR LISTS

[lestatdark]

Gah, completely missed the discussion thread >_>.

50th - Illusion of Gaia (SNES, 1994)
Starting my list off with the second entry in the Quintet "trilogy", Illusion of Gaia is a pretty good RPG that had a bit of flaws which prevents it from gaining higher spots like the two other entries in the trilogy. While having an amazing history, relatively high difficulty for a RPG and some pretty good level and character design, Illusion of Gaia was also an extremely linear and slow paced RPG, which set it apart from the trilogy's open ended gameplay and fast paced adventure and exploration.

        

 

49th - Dragon Quest VIII: Journey of the Cursed King (PS2, 2006)
The second-to-last spot marks the debut of the first Dragon Quest game on my list. One of my favourite RPGs in the entire PS2 catalog, it brought back the feeling of exploration and open-world of the 8 and 16-bit era JRPGs back into the era of story driven, little exploration RPGs. While not having a solid story as previous Dragon Quest games, the battle system was much more fluid and open to more strategies with the introduction of systems like Tension or attack combos, and the pacing was excellent, with a few twists in the right places to keep the player wanting to know more. Kudos as well for the excellent monster battle side-game and the better alchemy system. Oh, and also it has Jessica... .

      

 

48th - Tales of Phantasia (SNES, 1996)
The only Tales of game in my list, Tales of Phantasia is an amazing RPG with one of the most thought provoking villains and endings that I've seen in a video game. The entire premise of your actions are based on the fact of overthrowing a tyrant which was only acting out in desperation of his entire planet, your final actions have a lot of weight and leave open a lot of questions that are only partially answered in future Tales of games. Having said this, the game did have a lot of pacing troubles, with a lot of void and meaningless tidbits in between some actual good story moments, plus it had a badly responsive and bugged battle system from time to time which annoying given the high difficulty of the overall battles (this issue was later resolved on the PSX version, with a much more responsive command input system and better animations).

      

 

My next game will be a second entry in a RTS series known for it's building of kindgoms and fun LAN battles.