Its weird despite how much I enjoy many RPGs I feel l find myself constantly at odds with the genre to this day as so many just come off so bland or badly designed to me. And I didn't much care for a lot of the older classics people always mention. Once we got to the end of the 90s, that's when I started getting in to them and I've enjoyed quite a few since. Here's my top 10 to date.
11/10 the greatest RPG of all time. Such an insane amount of dialogue, quests, playable characters, specializations, brilliant story and questing, crazy fun ability load outs, gorgeous environments, fantastic lore so on and so forth it can almost seem overwhelming and surreal at times just how jaw-droppingly excellent this game is in all respects.
How it doesn't get brought up more often is beyond me, its fucking weird I had to basically accidentally stumble in to realizing this was one of the greatest video games ever made. Like for fuck sake this game has a talking delightful skeleton boy and not one but TWO lizards you can have in your team.
A special journey I look forward to going through again entirely differently some day.
I wrote most of Septerra's page on Giant Bomb. And for good reason, back in 99 it was THE game I obsessed about in my early teen years, played it again and again and again. I will never forget Maya, Led, Lobo, Badu, Araym and Corgan. Such fantastic characters.
Humorously it wasn't until I was much older I realized how much of a blatant copy of many JRPGS of the era Septerra was but its specific aesthetic and design still remains rather unique and I wish I could get something else again with its vibe of organic bone ships and magic rifles and card deck ability summons.
Not a day goes by I'm not pissed off that Front Mission 4 never got released in Pal territory and that FM5 to this day remains untranslated. FM3 was my Xcom before I knew how much I would love Xcom but with mechs! God what an amazing game, says a lot that despite the ps1 era visuals actual drama was achieved when the "characters" on screen were 20 polygon robots that couldn't even have animated fingers. Great music and stompy sounds too.
Fuck Square for abandoning this series and offloading it to other studios who keep fucking it up also.
One of my most beloved video games ever. Xeno2 was unfairly hated for a mere couple of its dumber character designs but is a charming, silly, fun story I enjoyed so much.
A masterfully excellent conclusion to the Xeno trilogy.
Lost count of how many times I went through origins. I definitely completed the full game at least 3 times but I made new characters and sunk so many hours in to all of them many more times than that. Bioware's peak frankly.
It is an absolute crime how overlooked this game has been, having completed it a mere day before making this list I now know it to be one of the all time greats. Phenomenal characters, great story, fantastic dialogue and such fun choices and varied decisions to be made and with enough Xcom2 in its combat it was like playing a more rpg-ish version of one of my all time favorite games too. Usually not that in to post apocalypse stuff but this was the one that seemed like it was built for me since melee and shotguns are pretty ideal.
Pretty funny at times too with biting satire of american politics and culture.
Everyone knows Mass Effect. If you don't, the fuck you doing.
Just make sure you play the correct way; with femshep. And be the goodiest goody goody ever. And then replay as malshep and be the biggest asshole ever.
I'm one of those weird people who prefers the core gameplay design of ME1 over 2 even though its flawed. But 2 is still 2 and its kind of hard to separate the first and second and how damn polished 2 was. I almost feel like they're two sides of the same game and 3 is where stuff just kind of got all fucked up and terrible and disassociated from them.
I think if 3 had just been dlc for 2 instead, we'd all have ultimately been happier.
Everything I wish Diablo 3 had been and more. Surprisingly huge, loved the dlc too. Damn good game.
