This year introduced the Dreamcast to the fray, but it appears that I may have contributed to the console's early death and Sega becoming a third-party since I never bought the console. I played kiosks at stores, but I never owned a Sega console before then... and that really wouldn't change until almost a decade later when I was handed an old Genesis found at an abandoned apartment.
In many ways, it's a product of a pre-Final Fantasy VII environment, one involving an optimistic hero and an innocent young woman with incredible powers. The squat, 2D character sprites look ripped out of any number of Super Nintendo RPGs, while the story stays pretty lighthearted throughout. The unique translation is perhaps partially to blame. It's hard to imagine there's many games with tongue-in-cheek references to Bill Clinton, especially ones set in a fantasy world.
Yet the game is surprisingly progressive. The anime cutscenes hold up far better than Square's CG, and Lunar did voice acting (albeit somewhat ham-fisted) years before Final Fantasy. And as strange as the translation could be, it was genuinely good.
Unfortunately, the Lunar series has stalled for years. Remakes of Lunar: Silver Star and the horrible Lunar: Dragon Song haven't done much to pave the way for a Lunar 3, and being over a decade since this version of Lunar 2, it's easy to wonder if the same people are still around. Perhaps it's time better spent trying to acquire the rights to digitally re-release these games from defunct publisher Working Designs.
Termina... is a pretty obvious name for a land as fucked as this. The moon is falling straight onto the town square, set to destroy and kill everything, Link included. And indeed it does, over and over and over again, until you beat the four bosses and put an end to the Majora Mask-possessed Skull Kid.
Majora's Mask is probably just what we needed. More Ocarina of Time wouldn't have likely made the same impact, forcing it to stand in the original's shadow, like BioShock 2 to the original BioShock. Instead, we got a game that stood apart from Ocarina through unique ideas that fans fondly remember. If any Zelda game could be considered most indie, it's definitely Majora's Mask.
Back when I was younger, I dove into the Pokemon Trading Card Game with almost as much enthusiasm as I did the regular Pokemon games. I even attended weekly events at toy stores and attended a tournament at a Wizards of the Coast store (quite the humbling event, I'll admit). Unfortunately, unless you enjoy admiring the cards, the TCG required an additional person. That's probably why I loved Pokemon: The Trading Card Game... game.
Forward to earlier this year when I bought a used copy of Pokemon TCG for, like, a buck. Boy, that game isn't easy to return to. The visuals during battles have all the splendor of Microsoft Excel, and it's as responsive as the controls for Smash 3DS when playing an online match. But I have my cherished memories, which is probably a lame reason to put this game ahead of Metal Gear Solid.
I never said these awards were fair.
If anyone longed for more adventures of Solid Snake in 2D, they had to look no further than Metal Gear Solid, or Metal Gear: Ghost Babel as Japan knows it. That's actually a better name since it tells a story in which Metal Gear Solid never happened (although several familiar faces show up), but evidently the North American department decided that capitalizing on the success of the PS1 game took precedent over removing it from the "Solid" story.
Even though it plays closer to Metal Gear and Metal Gear 2, certain aspects of Metal Gear Solid were included, such as boxes and stupid boss names.
Before X and Y finally brought Pokemon battles into the third dimension, fans had to purchase games like Pokemon Stadium, which allowed us to transfer our teams from the Red and Blue. Then we could watch our little bastards go through a linear series of battles as we defeat the same gym leaders and the same Elite Four, except in 3D! After all that, we dealt with Mewtwo, which was always a hell of a fight.
In hindsight, we probably got screwed. I mean, nothing but battles? Stadium completely lacked the RPG elements and capturing that people loved! Well, at least we could play the Game Boy games on our television through Stadium. I mean, we could do that with Game Boy Player, but we had to justify Stadium somehow.
After Pokemon, the concept of releasing two largely identical versions of the same game hadn't gone unnoticed. Game Boy saw plenty of this, and Bomberman jumped into the pool right alongside everyone else. Okay, honestly, I have no idea of Blue Champion and Red Challenger are identical, but I'm assuming they are.
I owned the latter, which brought some nobody character into a single-player Bomberman adventure that involved saving... what else? Cute monsters. Hey, Bomberman hasn't exactly been immune to selling out. Act Zero is probably the greatest, and worse, example of this.
