Mega Drive is the classic, and it does have some really great games, but Dreamcast has Skies of Arcadia, which is one of my favourite games of all time. Not just that, but Soul Calibur which IMO, demolishes any of the sequels, including the one with the Create a Character mode (I forget if it was 3 or 4) - the original Soul Calibur was a fighting game that felt like an adventure of epic scale. Sonic Adventure, to me, felt like the next big step in 3D platforming - and while it was a bit hit and miss, it was still hitting home runs - my favourite Sonic game is still 2 and 1 will always have a place in my heart, but Adventure felt like the future in a way games rarely do.
Mega Drive has a lot of other great games. IMO, the best versions of a lot of them are the 3DS ones that make their parallax planes really pop in a beautiful and satisfying way. So, I feel it is a great choice.
My pick for Dreamcast over Mega Drive is largely because I was bedridden with the kissing disease - hospitalized and on IV for a time - and this was the console I had at the time it had the games I needed. Skies of Arcadia I played three times in this period. But I played a ton of Soul Calibur and other games. I was trying to avoid being social, but people would come over to play Soul Calibur with me. It made what would have been a miserable time in my young adult years a lot of fun.
I also see Dreamcast as the first modern console.
Skies of Arcadia, in my view, had one rival on modern consoles, until Xenoblade Chronicles, and that was Final Fantasy X. I mean, I was a huge fan of Xenosaga, but that one ended up a train wreck, no official western release aside from the second game, which is IMO a huge decline from the second, and while a lot of people like the third game the best, to me it felt far too forced - while Xenogears cut out a lot of the character dev stuff from the last 10% of the game (disc 2), you could still see an organic looking story digging into the constructs of a 10,000 year old biological AU. On the other hand, I felt Xenosaga Episode 3 felt more like characters being forced into doing things uncharacteristic for them because the plot required it. But I’ve rambled way off topic - only because Xenosaga I felt should have been the best RPG series of that era; but to me, Skies of Arcadia really takes the throne. It’s not a perfect RPG, but it is so beautiful, even to this day, despite its heavily outdated graphical fidelity. Skies, makes me long for exploration across a beautiful world that doesn’t exist on a level above almost every other RPG of all time. Xenoblade, Makna forest, was the next time I felt it on that level - although, I admit, FFX came close.
Just in case it’s not clear: Dreamcast is my vote.
Last edited by Jumpin - on 31 May 2022I describe myself as a little dose of toxic masculinity.
