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I had a good feeling! Celebrating 40 Years and 108 JRPGs of Destiny

I played Gold and Silver when it came out. Got through most of the games, but Gold and Silver are basically where I decided I was done with Pokemon. I’m old enough that when the 1st Gen hit, I was borderline too old for these “kiddy games” to begin with. 2nd Gen tho, I was neck deep in high school and definitely felt both too old for this anymore, plus was fairly unsatisfied by the core gameplay loop being completely unchanged. I played R/B/Y to death and playing more of the same had vanishing appeal at a time when I had less and less time to play games and wanted games that were “more mature”.

In retrospect, I think my experience with Gold and Silver says more about me and the point in life I was in, versus any subjective qualities of the game. Yeah, it was just more of the exact same stuff. Thats not necessarily a bad thing though. I just kinda aged myself out. My brother who is a good 3 years younger than I am, still adored and played the hell out of G/S.

I do remember them being gorgeous games though. That aspect felt like a proper generational leap.
 
Pokemon was a bit after my time. Google tells me Gold/Silver were released in November 1999. Not only was I a sophomore in college, I was also two months married. Pokemon was something for people younger than me, and certainly for people that had more time to kill than I had, and I largely ignored it.

I'm only commenting to say that I adore the conceit of part of the first game being within the second. I finished DQ2 for the first time this year and I was utterly delighted to find that DQ1 fits inside of it. If Gold/Silver does a similar thing, it gets my thumbs up on that alone.
 
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40. Trials of Mana
Squaresoft, 1995: SFC Points: 370 Votes: 10 Previous Rank: 42​

On the SNES the name SquareSoft was associated with quality, and, as the years rolled into the late 90s, a certain mystique. Scattered import news and RPG aficionado rumor on the early internet meant that western gamers came to learn of a whole secret catalog of Japanese-only titles. These days, most of these games have been officially localized, and an even larger number of them made available through fan translations. And yet, this phantom library—about two-thirds of the Super Famicom’s total RPGs—still retains a certain glamour about it. A secret or removed quality, imbued with a subversiveness or a distinctive otherness that lends a special flavor to its phantom games.

I refer to these SFC Japanese-only releases as phantom titles for several reasons, aside from the primary fact that they weren’t officially distributed in the west. First, one learned about these games through rumor or discovery, not through official outlets. Next, they had to be acquired through circuitous means—the arcane rituals of rom and emulator—and with a certain anti-establishment culpability—unless you were the sort of Young Sheldon to always delete the rom in under 24 hours. Additionally, these games were played in a sort of phantom manner, not on a proper console hooked up to a TV, but on a computer, with a keyboard, often with strange intermediaries like untranslated text or emulator issues. These games were more than the ones that we didn’t get or only got later, but belong to a special category whose unique context gives them a unique expression.

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Preeminent among these is Seiken Densetsu 3, colloquially known as Secret of Mana 2, later christened as Trials of Mana. Even among the other phantom titles, it especially rings with the phantom quality. One reason it stands apart is that it was initially considered for a western release, before the scope of its localization was decided to be too demanding. The mainstream gaming press did report on it as Secret of Mana 2, generating excitement among players, but the cancelled localization paired with the release of the polarizing Secret of Evermore, endowed Seiken Densetsu 3 with a further allure.

Further, when English-speaking audiences got to play it for the first time via fan translation in the summer of 2000, they found that it was not quite the game they expected the renowned but inaccessible sequel to beloved Secret of Mana to be. Secret of Mana is an infamously messy game, held together more with endearing hopefulness than robust code. For its sequel, the team at Squaresoft built the code from ground up, creating an action-RPG brawler that feels and plays decidedly differently than Secret. At the ground level, Seiken Densetsu 3 operated with different rhythms in both combat and exploration, but structurally too it was a whole different animal. The game is designed around party and class planning. At the beginning you pick a team of three out of six primary characters, each whom plays differently and covers a specific role. Then, at key points of the game, you specialize each character into one of four master-classes. On top of this, each character has an unique intro chapter that introduces them into one of three primary quests that make up the rest of their playthrough. With all this degree of choice and variation, the game becomes one of two halves. The first is expressed through the decision making of what character you want to main, what team you want to take, and what builds will serve them best. The second half is the playing out of these decisions, and seeing how the game articulates under different combinations. It’s a game meant to be replayed and enjoyed via player expression through these party composition choices. This gives it a very different flavor and uncanny quality when compared to Secret of Mana. (Playing it also makes clearer the progression to blacksheep masterpiece Legend of Mana, an even more deviant game.)

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Lastly, something must be said of Trials of Mana, the recent HD 3D remake, which, for all its modern bells and whistles, is notable for how much it adheres to the original. The game is a complete remake from the ground up, but it endeavors to stay accurate in ways that you don’t often see in a 2D-to-3D conversion of this type. It not only retains Seiken Densetsu 3’s unique rhythms and structure, but often its very map designs, to the point where Trials of Mana feels like the developers reached down into the flat 2D world of Seiken Densetsu 3 and pulled it up into the Z-axis, stretching out its environments into inhabitable 3D space. This gives the remake a charming diorama-like atmosphere where it feels like you’re running around an environment meant for a different context.

The SNES phantom library is an important piece of the golden age of JRPGs and also in the history and development of the form, in the ways that certain games were exposed to certain audiences, and through certain means. Seiken Densetsu 3, Secret of Mana 2, Trials of Mana—whatever you want to call it—stands as the emblematic title of the phantom games. Not just because of its unique reputation as a game reserved from the west, but also in its uncanny expression, which lines up so well with its identity as the game we never got.
 
Had I submitted my list, this would have been #11.

I remember downloading Seiken Densetsu 3 in the late 90s or early 00s and feeling like it was familiar but uncanny. It was a kind of "Super Mario Bros. 3 to Super Mario World" situation. "This is the same! This is entirely different!" Didn't really help that it had no English patch at the time and I don't read Japanese, so there was a lot of fumbling around. I eventually used GameFaqs as an attempt to get through it. I never finished original SD3, though. I remember being frustrated that I could not class change despite finding the means to do so; I had not leveled up enough, apparently.

But the 3D remake? I played through it three times in a row, back to back, so that I could see every story. I hadn't done that since I was a literal child, restarting a game as soon as I finish it. It's a blast to play and as Lokii said, it really does feel like they just lifted the 2D game, put it through a 3Dification machine, and then dropped it on us. "How do you like this shit?" A whole, whole lot, turns out.
 
I voted for this as Seiken Densetsu III, up at #9 on my list. Great game, though it's also probably true that the mystique Lokii talks about bumped it up on my list. I had a different experience than those suffering through shaky emulation though - I got to go on a summer exchange program to Japan in undergrad shortly after its release, and it was one of a handful of Super Famicom carts I picked up, playing them first on my host family's SFC and then breaking the tabs in my SNES when I got home so I could continue.

Of course, even though I was in Japan at the time, my Japanese was pretty rudimentary, and of course playing on cart meant no translation. This wasn't much barrier with a game like Magic Knights RayEarth that was designed to be understandable by grade-schoolers, but SD3 operated on a higher level with tons of vocabulary I don't know. But fortunately, as a fantasy RPG, there's crutches to be had - most fantasy-proper-nouns get written out in Katakana, so I could follow them, and then there's the fact the Mana games famously revolve around their own set of elemental spirits and crystals and such, and I knew the kanji for those. That left me enough sign-posts to make my way through the game for the most part, though I'm sure I had to ask my hosts for help and/or look things up from time to time. It was definitely an interesting way to play the game, just barely understanding the thrust of the several interweaving plots, though the fantastic pixel art went a long way to fleshing out the world and characters even when I was missing half the dialog.

All that reminiscing aside, it's still a great game; the six-character, three-storyline, 24-class system certainly gives it some of the most replayability of any Mana title, and I did play at least enough to hit all three major end-games. Other than that it's mostly a more polished Secret... except for the class system which, yeah, I'll admit the best course is probably to just look up the final classes and plan accordingly. I mean you certainly *can* go in blind and still finish the game with about any set-up, but if you want a team with synergy some strategizing is required. I think better in-game sign-posts to how classes are going to pan out is pretty much the only improvement I'd make to the game.

I was intrigued by the 3D remake, but as usual, never managed to make time for it...
 
I had both Trials of Mana and Seiken Densetsu 3 on my list, SD3 as #2. While I absolutely agree with all the praise for Trials, I personally have a bit of trouble navigating 3D environments and I just didn't think the graphics look as beautiful as the sprite work of the original, the SNES game was stunning so it's a high bar to clear.

I bought the Super Famicom cartridge and a converter that let me play those games on my SNES, but knowing basically zero Japanese at the time meant that didn't get far. So SD3 was my first attempt using a ROM and a translation patch. I was on a Mac so options were a bit limited but I was so excited once I finally played it. And my team is either Hawk-Rise-Kevin or Hawk-Rise-Carlie depending on my mood.
 
Kirin said:
Of course, even though I was in Japan at the time, my Japanese was pretty rudimentary, and of course playing on cart meant no translation. This wasn't much barrier with a game like Magic Knights RayEarth that was designed to be understandable by grade-schoolers, but SD3 operated on a higher level with tons of vocabulary I don't know. But fortunately, as a fantasy RPG, there's crutches to be had - most fantasy-proper-nouns get written out in Katakana, so I could follow them, and then there's the fact the Mana games famously revolve around their own set of elemental spirits and crystals and such, and I knew the kanji for those. That left me enough sign-posts to make my way through the game for the most part, though I'm sure I had to ask my hosts for help and/or look things up from time to time. It was definitely an interesting way to play the game, just barely understanding the thrust of the several interweaving plots, though the fantastic pixel art went a long way to fleshing out the world and characters even when I was missing half the dialog.
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Sounds a bit like me playing Chrono Trigger, with my still pretty broken English.

Even back when I first discovered emulation, I couldn't quite get into Secret of Mana. SD3, though, I liked enough to make two playthroughs. Looked beautiful and the setup with the different storylines was cool. I think those were my main draws. I mean, the class system was pretty cool, class change and thinking about what to choose is just fun. Even though I only found the battle system fine. But I had fun.
 
Anyway I distinctly recall emulating SD3 and it looking like a fake-ass game in the menu. The character sprites didn't seem to match the background spritework and they felt photoshopped on.
 
Oh yeah, it had the big stylized character art for the in game class illustrations, didn’t it? It’s like if you tried to put the original full Amano art in 16-bit FFs, which they never really attempted until some later remakes.
 
I tried emulating this back in the day and I think I ran into a roadblock at the crab? For some reason I couldn't damage it, if I'm understanding correctly. But I managed to play the 3D remake recently, and it was pretty good! I liked the class planning and choices, even if it was a bit of a simple/clunky system and I absolutely looked up guides to make sure all my choices were, if not optimized, at least not detrimental. It worked! I only played through once, though, with Riesz as my leader. But I liked all the cameos from the other characters, it really helped the world feel a little bigger.
 
Gorgeous sprite work, and putting together a team is always fun. Not a fan of pausing the action for spell/special attack animations, and I feel like a lot of the classes in the SFC version were just outright bad, which is really unfortunate because the branching class paths is a really cool idea (though to be fair, some of the choices are pretty easily telegraphed, like taking the cleric down the evil class path is obviously a mistake).

There were definitely bosses that would counter your higher tier special attacks with full screen, unblockable moves, and I'm generally not a fan of games giving you a toy and then punishing you for using it.

Also I don't know if it was supposed to be an homage to climbing the mountain multiple times to meet Sage Joch in Secret, but I feel like you have to climb the mountain up to Laurent way too much.

Anyway, Trials is an incredible ambitious title for the platform, and even with the shortcomings and qualms I have with it, I think it executes those ambitions better than other ambitious SFC JRPGs like the Romancing SaGa games or Star Ocean.

The remake is also good, and far better than the Secret of Mana 3D remake.
 
I think you could land right outside the Palace of Darkness cave but not the cave to Sage Joch. Might be misremembering.
 
I had Trials of Mana, the remake, at #30. I enjoyed the combat a lot even if it is on the simpler side, and the revamped stat distribution system that lets you see what you're going to learn at any given number of points invested is great. There's lots of stuff to find in almost every area, so I'd get constant little dopamine hits just running around and exploring, whether in towns or dungeons. The wide variety of possible party builds offer lots of replay value; I played through it three times to see all the story routes and had a blast the whole time, and I'm sure I'll play it again in the future. Oh, and I really like how it preserved the structure of the original game despite modernizing the core gameplay. There are no time-wasting sidequests, cutscenes are short and to the point. It really combines the best features of old and new JRPGs.
 
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39. Final Fantasy XV
Square Division 2, 2016: Eighth Generation Points: 371 Votes: 8​

Upon booting Final Fantasy XV the first thing the player is greeted with is a mission statement. “A FINAL FANTASY for fans and first-timers.” This at first seems more than a little incongruous. FFXV is a radical departure from the series' baseline on all fronts. Instead of typical JRPG structure, it’s an open world game. Instead of whimsical fantasy, it has a dusty hyper-realistic aesthetic. Instead of showcasing a stately, refined turn-based battle system, it’s an action-RPG for chrissakes.

And yet, as one spends time with the game, more and more of its early-series inspirations and modes of expression come into focus. For all its radical posturing, XV is deeply indebted to the series as it was and fulfills that mission of bridging the old with the new. The open-world design, it turns out, is recreating the tired-and-true experience of wandering an overworld. The world itself is less grounded in realism, but more a fantasyland of the American West; where realism-derived scenery like telephone poles and concrete pipelines are used to enhance the unrealness of the landscape. The Car Boys, for all their dour blacks and edgy boy-band stylings are as fun, charming, and goofy as ever a Final Fantasy party member ever was. And its action battle system especially straddles the old and the new in surprising and surprisingly effective ways.

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If we imagine RPG-related genres on a spectrum we could place at one extreme the traditional turn-based JRPG, where battles are formally structured in discrete rounds and every action is selected via a menu, and at the other end Character-Action or Action-Adventure games, where combat is entirely reliant on real-time responses and button presses directly correspond to specific actions. In between these poles stand timing-reliant traditional RPGs, Strategy RPGs, and Action-RPGs. What positions a game along the line are input method and how much the combat relies on timing and positioning. Basically, we move down the spectrum from representation to performance. At the traditional end, everything in the battle is codified or stands in for an action, which is represented by on-screen graphics or statistics, but the action itself is implied rather than actualized. What matters is that you select the Fight command, not how the sword is actually swung. At the other end, all action is performed. The graphics don’t just depict the action, but must be interpreted and responded to by the player, in the moment. The sword must be swung at the right time and in the right place. The various sub-genres play with these considerations to create hybrid games. A strategy RPG is still mostly representational, but positioning matters. An Action-RPG mostly requires an action mindset, but still representational considerations of stats and growth are just as required for success as timing a sword swipe.

For the most part, Final Fantasy has occupied a place a step or two down the line from the traditional JRPG. The games are turn-based (mostly) but with an added timing or action element. Be it ATB, overdrive QTEs, or telegraphed AoEs, there has been felt throughout the series a pull towards action and bombast that is markedly different from the formal and rigid battle systems of games like Dragon Quest. The developers at Square have indicated as much, saying they always wanted Final Fantasy games to be action affairs but technological limitations meant menu-based combat was adopted instead. As much as this sentiment may seem self-defeating and a boneheaded rejection of the very things that make Final Fantasy fun and popular, it has borne out rich fruit. The drive to make the traditional battle system more dynamic, action-oriented, and vivid has produced rich, innovative games and has been a creative wellspring of surprising fecundity.

Enter Final Fantasy XV, the first game in the series to be fully action-oriented. But its battle system manifests in a strange form. Square had already solved the action-RPG more or less, and games like Kingdom Hearts proved viable models to base a hybrid action/menu combat system after. And yet XV doesn’t play like Kingdom Hearts, or a Mana game, or anything else really. It takes odd stances and requires new assumptions. For example, you don’t press a button to execute an attack or to dodge out of the way of an incoming hit. Instead, if you hold down the attack button, main character Noctis will unleash a flurry of blows against everything and anything, warping instantly across the landscape if need be to land a strike. Likewise, holding down the dodge button makes him untouchable to everything and anything and he will remain perfectly safe until the button is released. Additionally, combat occurs in real-time and requires in-the-moment reaction to navigate, as long as Noctis is moving. But if you take your finger off the d-pad and let him stand still, then time will halt, giving the player opportunity to assess, plan, and select items from a menu.

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FFXV is truly a hybrid. It takes the appearance and form of action-RPG combat, but requires the player to think in stances and modes. When is it best to take the FIGHT stance? To DEFEND? To use an ITEM? Or cast a SPELL? In many ways, XV’s action combat is much more simplistic than other games in the same genre. And that’s because it’s not really an action-RPG, but rather demands the kind of thinking usually associated with earlier Final Fantasy strategizing, where the intent of an action matters more than its performance.

This is what I find so fascinating about Final Fantasy XV, the game for fans and first-timers alike. It adopts the forms and stylizations of contemporary Action-RPGs (and even serves as the model for the more entrenched Action-RPG expressions that Final Fantasy has explored in its wake), but it harkens back to the modes and manners of the earliest games in the series. It truly is a bridge game, and unique and wonderful in its particular manifestation as that bridge. And, as we know, bridges are at the very heart of what Final Fantasy means.
 
I'll be honest, it didn't register that this game would show up. I have my problems with it, but I still enjoyed it quite a bit when it came out, and despite the combat changes, it still felt undeniably "Final Fantasy" in myriad ways. I have yet to get to FFXVI, but just the opening sequence had such a tonal shift that I'm like... is this really still the same series? I didn't have that problem with FFXV, to its eternal credit.
 
I played the launch release (I think like a week after I finished the survival horror section is when they patched in the alternate route or whatever?) and did not much care for it. An endless sprawl of open roads with nothing of value to find, a small assortment of side missions that didn't feel up to the series's usual standards, and, perhaps the greatest sin of all, no sense of character progression, mechanically speaking.

Great Florence + The Machine cover of Stand By Me though, even if the lyrics end up being perhaps a bit too literal in-game. The intra-party dynamic is pretty good and the cast feels well realized in that respect, but then it stumbles off a cliff when they try to give them actual character development story beats.
 
For me, FF15 lives next to FF12 in a category of "Games I enjoyed playing but have no real fond recollections in hindsight." It's fun watching the boys interact with each other in the moment but they are largely forgettable and uninteresting, the story as presented is not particular exciting after letting it marinate for a bit, the primary antagonist and villains are kinda boring. It is a beautiful game, though. Fun to marvel at. Lovely soundtrack too, as expected of a Final Fantasy. Valse di Fatastica alone!

Having said that, one of the things I've seen from a number of people since its release - although this viewpoint is less common now, thankfully - is their resentment at having to do homework to understand the story and the long-term character motivations. Except, of course, they are not required to do any such homework. I have always rejected this notion of homework, rejected the idea that somehow in medias res is a problem. (Yes, FF15 does this interesting thing where it opens at the end, goes backward in time, but it doesn't arrive at the capital-b Beginning of the story. It reverses itself to a, at best, middle point.)

Over the years, I've mostly come to understand it as some fellow geeks being uncomfortable with the unknown. Geeks love knowing things, love possession of knowledge, and an obvious absent true beginning - "THIS PART IS MISSING" - does not sit well on the mind. How troublesome then that FF15 essentially says, "Trust me, bro. You'll pick up the important context as we move along." Not good enough, apparently. Must know all the things! Begin at the Beginning! S-E themselves seemed to account for this tiresome yet inevitable nonsense in the form of Brotherhood, Parting Ways, Kingsglaive, and so on, even if some of this exploratory content seems to me like it's "accidentally" enlightening, the residue and detritus of a troublesome project.

To wit, none of the shit that happens before Noctis and Co. are pushing the car down the road is necessary to enjoy FF15, and I personally think the game is more interesting (albeit not necessarily enjoyable) being dropped right into it. Certainly, the game is under no obligation to explain any more than it already does.

The truly unfortunate thing about FF15 is that it's all flashes and vibes with precious little substance. I willingly accept that may be a me "problem".
 
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pokemon gs: in a weird way this is my childhood nostalgia pick, a friend that i frequently carpooled to school with's dad brought the game back as an import and he knew so much from playing red endlessly that he was able to understand a lot just from seeing things in action. not that i really played it all that much myself but it's pretty obvious even from the ones that i have played the huge influence they had on the direction of the series

sd3: ...a tragic victim of "i thought i was going to like this a lot more" for me. not that it's terrible or anything, but when i first tried them as a teenager i thought it was obviously significantly better, but then in my 20s i ended up finishing secret first and later played it a second time on the m2 mana collection before finally picking up 3 in earnest. i do think the heavier replay features are a big upgrade and i did go for the game twice in a row to use all six characters and all that, but i wasn't feeling a desire to go over and over like it obviously invites. i feel like it has an excessive amount of Square Counterattacks and that's not the only reason kevin is the best character in the game by a tremendous amount, but the combat does feel way smoother overall than the first two games

the demonic triple head boss at the end of the angela&duran (?) storyline is soooooo sick, coolest boss in the series i've seen probably, but the game froze the first time i fought it lol

ffxv (royal edition): #13. when i cast my votes, this was easily my favorite post-psx ff game, so i was kinda surprised looking at my list seeing that this wasn't in the top 10, some stuff i've played in the last couple years pulled ahead cause i thought it was SO cool but this game hit really hard in early 2021 for me for a lot of reasons. missing just hanging out with people late at night at all, memories of being a teenager in the mountains (lucis really resembles colorado imo, some of that is kind of inevitable game-isms like the changing weather and windy roads through the hills but also the weird little towns and stops felt so familiar. and there's those stalls with ristras in them in lestallum), and the sort of generally wonky nature of the game. it's not really polished and it feels like it shouldn't be as good as it is, but it really does pull off being a game about the boys, i think especially because of the janky nature of the battle system. cooking is super overpowered so of course ignis is the best. but gladiolus can just send out some huge shockwave that pops 30 soldiers at once so he's pretty good too. and the picture mechanics are really great and funny, i thought about picking some total meme picture at the end of the game but i ended up going with a cool one of the party riding chocobos through a tunnel. i rode chocobos a lot, had a ton of fun unlocking them and they felt like a great supplement to the driving. this was a game i just had so much fun traversing the world, walking around, even more than death stranding. i feel like for how long i played a lot of the music rolled off me just a bit, i guess i was always thinking about other stuff and spent too long driving listening to the old-ff-songs playlist (i think you had to go really far for fast travel to be faster than driving on an original model ps4 with a stock hdd). but there are many tracks i still really like in this game, i think even the really "epic" movie soundtrack stuff rocks (especially apocalypsis noctis).

the fishing rules, it also kind of leans into the emotional sense of the game where it feels tense cause you're never quite sure how close you are to messing it up. to me that's the strong side of the story as well, the way the perspective is basically locked to noctis in the main game really worked for me and i've hardly wanted to know "more" about the world and characters. he's young and his life has been good...he loses virtually everything as the world turns literally darker and darker, and is totally unprepared for the feeling of being unable to help his companions in the ways they need. the process of reunion in the last chapter feels almost too easy, but it still works. even just knowing someone you've loved is hanging in there despite everything is one of the most tremendous and complex feelings in life and i think this game builds that up and pulls it off pretty well.

i adore ff15 and i'm pretty sure i'll always feel that it's a one of a kind game, and i didn't even see any of those hilarious bugs people were posting the first week. i can't imagine anyone having the resources to do this and consciously wanting to, especially since i can't imagine that anyone working on it thought it was going to turn out quite this way either. it's one of those things where even most of the parts that i could really criticize feel like they're imbued with some kind of artistic meaning i can take away. that's when you know you really love something
 
On the one hand, FFXV is probably a Top-4 FF game for me, on vibes alone. There's just something deeply appealing to me, to play a game about the boys going on a road trip. There are FF games with better characters in them, but FFXV has the best party of any FF game. It's got a Top-2 OST. And it is still a gorgeous game, now a full decade later.

But for me it's a conflicting thing to ponder. The game is half-finished in a nearly Xenogears-ian way. And even if the story played out fantastically, there was palpable disappointment knowing what we got was rushed and incomplete. Which hurts more because what there was, was really special!

And it's also a game that feels compromised. On multiple levels. Combat was almost entirely overhauled just months before the game's release. The Duscae Demo from just three months before the game came out, had combat that was much more complicated and deliberate in how it controlled. Playing that demo set a series of expectations, which the retail version felt watered down and bland in contrast. The removal of complex quest structures was bad too. And the Day One patch, attached a bunch of cutscenes from the companion film into the story in ways that clashed with the tone of the story's narrative structure and themes. I've rarely played a game where I felt the ongoing patches made the experience worse*.

There's good debate for what's the next FF game in the series that should get the VII Remake treatment. My brain says FF8 because it's my favorite, and it would slap from the visual upgrade. But my heart kinda says XV. Because it's a world/story that's neat enough to deserve completion in ways most of my other faves don't feel incomplete.
 
FFXV is probably the FF game I am the most confused about how I feel about it. The vibes of driving around, camping with the bros, exploring, is all really good. But the battle system never appealed to me, I didn't really enjoy anything in the game after meeting Leviathan, outside of parts of the last chapter. It has really, really good vibes and not much else.
 
I remember thinking FFXV was going to be a joyless affair when I saw the initial releases. A bunch of samey-dressed bros in a car?

Anyway it wasn't and I was so glad for it! I'll skip the gorey details but it came to me in a very challenging time in my life and it was exactly the kind of stress reliever I needed then.

Sloppy and unfinished, yes and yes, but a charming game regardless. I'll say this: it was the first Final Fantasy I rolled credits for since FFX. Good job Square, I applaud your hot mess of a game.

On the subject! What was that FFXV mini/mobile/chibi game or whatever that came out for phones and maybe Switch? Did anyone play that? What was it like?
 
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FFXV placing so high on this list flabbergasted me. I only played the vanilla version without any of the DLC, so take what I’m about to say with that in mind.

I don’t think I’ve went from enjoying something to outright hating it faster than I had with FFXV. All the driving/exploring/cooking/fishing around with your bros is fun, but that stops very suddenly, never to return. All your left with is maybe four extremely linear hours of whatever assets the dev team had finished up to that point. Maybe the DLC fixed some of the terrible later game pacing, but I’ll never know.
 
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38. Chrono Cross
Square, 1999: PSX Points: 376 Votes: 13 Previous Rank: 25
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If we are to think of JRPGs as works of artistic expression, that is works whose raison d’être is to explore and expand the dimensions of the craft in artful ways, then we must be prepared for works that challenge our assumptions. I don’t believe anybody expected or was prepared for the sequel to Chrono Trigger, the game of games, to emerge in the form it did. Chrono Cross is a challenging game on many levels, but primarily because of how distant it is from Chrono Trigger. Aside from some name-drops and some musical references, Cross has seemingly nothing to do with Chrono Trigger. Not in terms of plot, style, mechanics, or basic assumptions about how things ought to work or be presented. That is, until all of a sudden it becomes deeply intertwined with Trigger’s plot and characters. Not in any satisfying way, but rather by revealing the tragic fates of the previous game’s beloved cast. It’s almost like the game was made to thumb its nose at Trigger fans. To berate them for wanting anything so base as a sequel.

And that’s for the best, because a base Chrono Trigger 2 could only be just that: a reiteration and shadow form of something that was exceptionally vibrant. Chrono Cross, for all its frustrations and inexplicable design excesses, could never be accused of lacking vibrancy. It may not look, play, or feel like Chrono Trigger, but it’s bursting with big vision, big innovation, and big emotion.

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Chrono Cross begins to make sense when viewed as an alternate vision of Radical Dreamers, itself a kind of alternate conclusion to Chrono Trigger’s dangling mysteries. A limited-release visual novel Satellaview game, Dreamers attempted to wrap up the stories of Magus and Schala, but in doing so it introduced a whole heap of new concepts and lore: Serge, Lynx, and the Frozen Flame, Viper Manor, and Porre as continental power, among other motifs both serious and silly. Like Chrono Trigger, it offers a New Game+ mode that allows the player to explore other outcomes and branches of its choice-tree, and in doing so establishes a Sliding Doors approach to its narrative, one where dramatically different realities emerge from pivotal decisions.

Radical Dreamers suffered from a rushed production and creative lead Masato Kato felt like the game was only half-finished. Following the release of Xenogears came the opportunity to expand Radical Dreamers into a full-featured game, and in Chrono Cross’s final form we can see how it too can be seen as yet another variation of Dreamers’ sliding doors variability. It shares the same basic scenario: Serge and Kid infiltrate Viper Manor in search of Lynx and the Frozen Flame. But now the scenario is expanded far beyond that central event to explore the concept of splintered timeline lines in all sorts of ways big and small. Cross is simultaneously another of Radical Dreamers’ varied outcomes and the apotheosis of consequence following Lavos’ crash landing on Earth all those eons ago. It is one of many variations in the wake of that continuity-shattering event while at the same time being the official singular culminating one. A pretty neat trick!

While Cross is primarily a response to Radical Dreamers, that doesn’t mean it takes no inspiration from Tigger at all. Primarily, it borrows Trigger’s sense of innovation and rejection of traditional JRPG assumptions. Cross demands the player abandon their assumptions concerning battle mechanics (its elemental grid system is unlike anything else), resource management, stats and levels, inventory, party composition and interaction, and more. It is a deeply idiosyncratic game, and, perhaps due to its confrontational foreignness, one that hasn’t seen many of its core gameplay ideas revisited or further developed. That gives it a unique, timeless quality. Cross isn’t for everyone, but those who embrace its quirks find a game of rich depth unlike anything else.

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Lastly, it would be amiss not to comment on the game’s vibrant visual design. Along with Final Fantasy IX, Chrono Cross represents Square working at the height of their artistic powers in the pre-rendered background mode, which, as a temporary stopgap between 2D icon-based representation and full 3D polygonal freedom, was quickly coming to its end. Though this artistic style would soon be abandoned, here it is fully embraced. Square’s beautiful, colorful, stunning depiction of a fantastical equatorial archipelago shines forth from the screen with a vivid richness and artistic cinematography that alone justifies its existence.

Put it this way, for all its overstuffed character designs, awkward plotting, tenuous Trigger connections, unintuitive gameplay, and grating dialogue inflections, Chrono Cross is also a game that sees its most challenging and meaningful confrontation not against some epic monster but against a humble middle-aged man, set against the heartrending backdrop of a sunset. It’s a game that, like Chrono Trigger, refuses to wrap up cleanly but rather with the promise of another, perhaps hopeless, search for love. It’s a game that, for its title screen, gives us sea turtles among the coral gardens. For all the ways it seemed to go wrong, be messy, demand its players ask “what were they thinking?,” it still ran like the wind, whilst our laughter echoed, under cerulean skies…
 
Chrono Cross is a hot mess but there's gold in them thar hills for those willing to search. Also just an absolutely gorgeous game. I still consider it to have the greatest video game soundtrack of all time.
 
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