Cultural Impact: I feel boring for picking Chrono Trigger, but I can't vote for anything else here. I mean this is great game selection filled with lots of brilliant titles, but one definitely stands out. Chrono Trigger offered such a flawless balance between freedom and plot structure, action and narrative consequence, strategy and fluidity, cartoonish fun and existential substance, and such careful attention to every audio-video detail, that its world feels alive in a way that's truly transporting and (ironically!) never seems to age. And Akira Toriyama's character designs? As far as I'm concerned, they're the best on the Super NES!
It may be worth adding that there's even a refreshing diversity of roles for the ladies to be found here compared to just about any other RPG out there at the time. When it comes to the girls / young women in your party, for example, you'll notice that they're not just characters who are built primarily for supporting roles as healers in battle, but also the likes of Ayla, known for her tremendous physical strength. You had a tech genius (Lucca) and one of gaming's downright coolest princess characters (Marle), rounding things out. It was refreshing! By that point in life I had started to notice those things. And frankly, the entire cast of characters, from Robo to Frog to the fact the game gives you a way to recruit Magus...it's just alchemy. It really is.
When I think of the term "RPG", Chrono Trigger is still one of the first games that comes to my mind. It's had that much of an impact.
Personal Faves: In addition to Chrono Trigger, I can't let this opportunity go without mentioning a couple of my personal favorites from this year that I fear would otherwise be missed.
First off, and this is completely a reflection of personal bias I recognize, but Chop Suey was a computer game that my first girlfriend gave to me for my 13th birthday that I still enjoy casual revisits to to this very day. It's an open-ended point-and-click game with no goals. It's just exploration and discovery for its own sake and it's pretty funny. The small town in this game kinda reminds me of the one I grew up and still reside in (minus the supernatural elements 
). She said the two main characters, Lily and June Bugg, who explore the town in a mental haze after eating too much chop suey (hence the game's title) reminded her of us. Indeed their antics aren't too far off from things we might've done. Game's available online for free now here. And here's a "playthrough", which I have to put in quotations since the game doesn't actually have an end point.
And here is my favorite FMV game of the era, Solar Eclipse! Like I've said before, when I was first introduced to the concept of video games at a young age, my instinctive expectation had always been for them to be like a movie or a TV show you could interact with, to which end I'd initially been kind of disappointed by the technological limits of what was available. I always sort of retained a yearning for that type of experience though, to which end you won't be surprised to learn that I was initially a sucker for FMV games, including yep, Sewer Shark on the Sega CD, stuff like that. I was drawn to the concept until I experienced the execution anyway. 
The interactive movies available back then were just crap, like just in general. They were very lame B-movie material and the game play felt like a lazy tack-on nearly all the time rather than something narratively important. Wound up finding my "cinematic" gaming experiences in more conventional places back then instead (like certain RGPs and adventure games, for example). Solar Eclipse was the first big exception to that rule. This was an FMV game that had a real storyline and was also a full-fledged space rail-shooter much better than the likes of Star Fox whose game play turf it shared. Much of it feels like Star Fox but with real, adult human beings in place of anthropomorphic animals and it just felt cooler to me. Star Fox 2 may not have come out this year as promised, but hey, I got this instead! 
Here's the game that restored my faith in FMV games.
