OMG RPG.com

I like RPGs, but to be honest, I don't really play them for the story. First and foremost I need engaging gameplay, and I can tolerate quite a lot of bland, trite, and stupid if the game is otherwise good at what it does.

There are some games, though, that have a way of capturing the imagination and inhabiting your brain regardless of software limitations, objective storytelling flaws, or primitive game design. In fact, perhaps they capture your imagination because they aren't polished or sophisticated. When you played these retro RPGs, you could only really get into it if you were capable of imagining voices, cooler-looking battles, and better dialogue than what was actually in the goofy translations.

For these retro games, almost everything in the game that really mattered was ultimately provided by the player's own ability to imagine more than what was represented on the screen. These were games where you could really feel like part of the action, from an era where "press button jump mans forward shoot shoot pow" was really all most console games even tried to accomplish.

5. Chrono Trigger

You know why the upcoming Chrono Trigger DS port from Square-Enix is basically unchanged, new translation aside? Because the original game is as close to perfect as 16-bit console RPGs ever got. A lot of the basic combat and exploration mechanics are a decade ahead of their time, while the story shows off just how much potential a game sacrifices in the name of fancier graphics.

Chrono Trigger DS has thirteen distinct endings, and you can explore the world in seven different historical eras which all feel very distinct from each other. Can you seriously imagine an Xbox 360 game attempting to render such an ambitiously huge world? Even Fallout 3, which will have multiple endings, has to restrict itself to a single city for a setting. Chrono Trigger gave you an entire world and its timestream to explore, complete with events in the past altering future eras.

Now, Chrono Trigger is otherwise a game populated with pretty good characters, and filled with plotlines that range from average to brilliant. Lavos isn't the world's greatest final boss, but the fact that you are free to try dealing with him in a variety of different ways makes him a lot more compelling. Your characters are more compelling because of the ways they can team up with each other in combat to use Double and Triple Techs. Even restricted to simple sprite animations and backgrounds, the core ideas and design of Chrono Trigger are utterly compelling. It's the anime epic too big and densely plotted to ever be animated, and that's what makes it so amazing.

4. Final Fantasy IV

Game reviews are very rarely interesting reading, in the sense of being something that can make you think about a game differently. There was one review of the DS port of Final Fantasy IV, though, that's been rattling around my head a lot lately. It basically compared the game to Final Fantasy VII, alleging that both were hopelessly linear titles long on character fanservice and short on meaningful gameplay options.

That is, in a sense, completely true. Even with the FFIVDS Augment system in place, your characters still serve very predefined roles if compared to, say, the nearly interchangeable FFVII guys. They will always be good at some things and bad at others, and many characters are only available to you for limited, story-dictated periods of time. Where Aerith's death was FFVII's sole shocker, the FFIV cast paraded in and out of your party in a way that felt horribly unpredictable to me the first time I played it through. Every new plot twist was a genuine revelation.

So why do I love FFIV, and generally dislike FFVII? I seriously think it comes down to the way FFIV presented its story, which benefits tremendously from its linearity. FFIV is one of the few console RPGs you can play that feels less like automated D&D, and more like playing through the sort of fantasy novels I eagerly devoured as a teen. The SNES version told its story through terribly simple sprite animations, with nothing flashier than the odd Mode 7 effect. If you wanted to really bring the twisting plot about Cecil's betrayals and redemption to life, you really had to imagine the action in your own mind, just as if you were reading a novel. Characters came and went as the story dictated, rather than the character bloat and shrinking party sizes that characterized PS1 and later-gen games.

3. Phantasy Star II

The SNES games I mention above I either played on the original hardware, or as part of early ports to systems like the PlayStation. Phantasy Star II is a different case entirely, a game I didn't discover until well after I'd acquired and then sold my first Genesis. In fact, my first run-through with it was on an emulator, complete with all the speed-up and save-state benefits that entails. It's possible I might like Phantasy Star II less if I'd played it in its original, more primitive cart-based version, where you walked with agonizing slowness and had to grind like a madman just to survive. I kind of doubt that, though.

Where Phantasy Star II's gameplay lacks - and it just does, it's the turn-based RPG at its most unabashedly primitive and visually sparse - its story more than makes up the difference. Despite a heavily truncated translation and nearly NES-caliber overworld sprites, Phantasy Star II somehow managed to completely engross me. This is probably because it's one of the best console RPGs containing sci-fi elements you could ever play up until& gosh, Mass Effect or so. I'm hesitant to call Phantasy Star II pure sci-fi, since there's plenty of traditional fantasy RPG silliness going on with it from spells to viability of melee weapons, but these niggling gameplay issues are totally made up for by the greatness of the ending.

Unlike FFVI, Phantasy Star II's ending isn't mechanically great. There are no real gimmicks to it. No, it's just great in terms of pure story concept. I am going to go into less detail about it than I could, because Phantasy Star II is a more obscure title than the SNES classics I mentioned above and you folks out in reader-land are much less likely to have played it. I will say this: Phantasy Star II's ending is great in the way the ending of a great late 70's sci-fi flick or bugnuts 80's sci-fi anime is great. It is utterly ambitious, reckless, and even has something of a point to make when contemporaries could barely articulate core themes or, uh, narrative elements like what the hell is going on. It makes the Phantasy Star's degeneration into a series of plot-lite MMOs more than a little depressing, in retrospect.

2. Final Fantasy VI

It's kind of obvious that Squaresoft, at the time, clearly felt it had made FFIV too linear. Its follow-up was FFV, a grind-happy game with interchangeable characters and a tiny, boring cast. FFVI split the difference between the two game styles, offering players a lot of story, characters with very distinct abilities, but also a robust customization system with the Espers. In the second half of the game, you could choose to make everyone ueber-mages or just equip Espers to give characters useful stat boosts as they leveled; it was an easy game, a few tricky spots aside, and you'd probably clean house either way. The game's first first half, also breezy, revolved more around use of individual character abilities.

What makes Final Fantasy VI so memorable from a story standpoint is that the plot actually has structure, and manages to deftly manage a cast that is frankly huge even before you begin considering plot-free bonus characters like GoGo and Umaro. Every other character manages to have at least one fully-fleshed plot arc, and primary characters like Locke, Celes, and Terra actually move through several complete arcs. You can view the plot as occurring in two halves, first the World of Balance and then the World of Ruin maps. You can also comprehensibly interpret the plot as occurring in five distinct play-like acts, as dictated by which of the three primary characters is acting as protagonist at the time.

Where characters came and went with horrifying randomness in FFIV, FFVI let you gather almost everything, put you through the trauma of losing them, and then challenged you to gather everyone together in the World of Ruin again. You didn't have to, of course... you could actually go to the end of the game with just the three default characters, but who on Earth would do that after going through so much with the cast in the game's first half? I even wanted Cyan back, the worthless bastard.

This clever structure let them get the story benefit of FFIV's departures without incurring a similar gameplay cost, and allowed for the final dungeon to have an utterly memorable three-part structure that would allow you to use twelve of the game's fourteen characters, broken into three distinct teams. You could then rotate through all three teams as you fought the final boss, an experience that managed to be completely epic despite being conveyed with little more than still art and, probably, very simple spell animations.

1. Earthbound

Now, while I owned an SNES, I never actually owned a cart copy of Earthbound (and didn't love my original copy of Chrono Trigger as well as I should have, to be honest). In fact, I never really sat down and spent quality time with this game until 2007, when it occurred to me that the gal running a Nintendo blog should probably have a better idea of what the hell Earthbound is. So I did play it through in quickie emulator form, but probably would have liked it just as much if I played it on a proper SNES, at least mechanically. To play Earthbound is to play Dragon Quest with wackier damage types.

As far as the game's content goes& to be honest, I would've hated this game as the precocious tween I was when I was devouring Squaresoft's FF games. I wouldn't have understood what it was trying to accomplish even a little, and all told it was not a great game to try marketing to the kids who made up most of the gaming populace then. On the other hand, I now understand why this game has such a rabid base of older fans now. When you simply consider the writing behind Earthbound's simple graphics, and especially the music design, you are dealing with a deviously sophisticated RPG.

Few "comedy" video games manage to be consistently funny (as opposed to "sporadically amusing with bouts of annoying shit that gets more annoying the longer you play"). Even fewer comedy games attempt satire, and of that handful most titles will completely fail at it. Earthbound is this shining, glorious exception, an early game that managed to successfully blend social satire with a silly plot that somehow generated moments of bleak depression, existential dread, and the odd bout of terror.

You don't expect emotions like that from a vintage RPG at all, let alone a game that's full of jokes and silly weapons, and that's what makes Earthbound a brilliant writing exercise. Every step of your path subverts video game expectations and norms, in a way that's all at once surreal, hilarious and kind of unsettling. This is another one where I don't want to spoil anything for you if you haven't played - just believe me when I say you should. There's very little else out there like it, and hardly anything else that will haunt you the way Earthbound can.

• << prev
• next >>