I just finished reading an opinion piece on Gamers Platform called The Top 10 Influential RPGs. Please click on the link before you read any further. I've got nothing personal against the author, but the list was utter tripe. There's probably one RPG listed there that I'd consider to be quite influential (Final Fantasy VII) and the rest of them seem to be RPGs that the author particularly liked. He may as well have called it, "My Favourite RPGs". There also seems to be a whole chunk of RPG history that was conveniently skipped over by the author. It could almost be titled, "My Favourite RPGs Since the Advent of the PS1".

Anyway, I was going to reply and voice my disgust, but I think it'd be much more fun if we did our own, better top ten list of influential RPGs. If you're up for playing, we're going to do this elimination game style! That is, we'll have a list of nominees that we'll add and subtract points from until we have just ten games remaining. The ten. The Top 10 Most Influential RPGs (VGChartz style).

To start with, we'll need some nominations. This is phase one. Nominate RPGs that you think have been particularly influential. Love and respect for an RPG is not enough. With your nomination, you'll need to provide one sentence that describes what the game has done for the genre. There's no need to include a list of currently nominated games with your post. You can nominate as many games as you like in this phase.

All of the games suggested by Miles Michaels in his opinion piece have been automatically nominated. Nominations close at approximately midday on the 27th of August, VGChartz time. (DELAYED: Hopefully we'll get more nominations.)

Miles' List:

Chrono Trigger
Legend of Dragoon
Valkyrie Profile
Star Ocean: The Second Story
Disgaea: Hour of Darkness
Final Fantasy I
Kingdom Hearts
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion*
Grandia
Final Fantasy VII

A few suggestions from me to start us off:

Rogue - Spawned its own genre (Roguelike) and derivative titles like Diablo
Neverwinter Nights - First graphical MMORPG?
Ultima III - Inspired a lot of early Japanese top-down RPGs (like FF1)
Wasteland - Spawned the Fallout series

*Based on the fact that the original author talks about Oblivion under the Elder Scrolls entry. If you'd like to see other games from the series on this list, nominate them.

To clarify:

• CRPGs. I know I didn't specify it initially, but CRPGs
• Try not to list series, pick one defining game
• Please read the post. I'm not the JRPG lover here!
• I'll put a year next to Neverwinter Nights when the nominations are finished, just so that people know which one I'm talking about
• We're trying to improve on the original list. All games listed in the linked article were automatically nominated so that we can see whether Miles was right about any of them