PixlBit

As you now know, I’ve created a list of the top 230 console role-playing games of all time.  This is a list based on science.  It is completely objective, so sorry if you disagree with some of the choices here.  I know if you think long and hard about it, you’ll agree with every single game on this list, and their placements.  These are the 220-211^th best RPGs of all time.  Another name for them could be “some of the worst fucking RPGs ever created”.  Here’s a fun game: try and figure out the only ten games I have ranked lower than these stinkers.

220) Tecmo Secret of the Stars (SNES)- Oh good god, where to begin?  Here’s the one good thing about it- there is an interesting split party mechanic whereby you switch between characters to accomplish various storyline goals.  Here is the bad thing about that one good thing- you are forced to go through the same dungeon multiple times with those split parties, artificially inflating the game’s play time.  The graphics are bad, the music nondescript.  The game is tedious, filled with pointless dungeons and scores of random battles.  It often does a poor job of outlining the conditions you must fulfill to allow the generic story to progress.  I played this during one of those RPG draughts back in the mid-nineties, and even then I knew this one was a piece of shit.  I revisited it as an adult two years ago, and it was a little less shitty than I remembered.  So I moved it from 223 to 220.

219) Faerie Tale (Genesis)- A rare Genesis RPG.  It was one of those awkwardly bulky Genesis carts that had the strange yellow tab on the side.  Another game like that was King’s Bounty- now that was a good game!  Masterful in its simplicity; it has none of the bells and whistles of the more modern games in the series, but damn if the thing wasn’t eminently playable.  Searching the randomized world for treasure never gets old.  Fighting those cartoon enemies like Borgash Eyesore and Rinaldus Drybone.  And who could forget the lovable heroes Mad Moham and Sir Crimsaun?  How overpowered were dragons in that game, though?  If you fought ten dragons, your entire army was as good as dead.  And don’t even get me started on Arech Dragonbreath….. you know anybody who ever killed him?  Why would anybody go through the trouble, except for bragging rights?  If you fought even half the bosses or found those hidden treasures, the scepter’s location was plain as day.  And did you ever get the impression from looking at him that King Maximus was just a little too happy to be getting back the scepter in the end?  Methinks that Maximus has plans beyond just bringing peace to the kingdom.

218) 7^th Saga (SNES)- Once of the worst video-game-related things that has ever happened to me was when my six year old brother, in a fit of curiosity at having seen his siblings play games all day, popped in my copy of 7^th Saga and somehow erased my forty hour save file.  Now back in those days RPGs were few and far between, so you had no choice but get back on the horse and start it all over.  Now, if you’ve ever played this piece of junk, you sure as shit would not want to have to play it twice.  Ah, but the lot of man is to suffer, and suffer I did.  The world is barren, enemies are everywhere, and there is the broken leveling mechanic.  In case you didn’t know, enemies literally gain two levels for every one level you gain, meaning that grinding for experience actually only weakens you relative to your competition.  Read that again, and imagine how fucking weak you are when you reach level forty or so.  Enemies are on level eighty!  Fun fact- eight billion and eight is the third number when the integers are spelled in alphabetical order.  Oh, and that leveling thing wasn’t intentional on the part of the developers- it was a fucking mistake that was never corrected when the game was ported over here.  Makes the game damn close to unplayable.  Ah, but play we did, we pioneers of the halcyon days of video game’s yesteryear.  What- I was the only one who beat this piece of shit?

217) Final Fantasy II (NES)- This game must have some fans somewhere out there.  There are people who literally swear by the Final Fantasy series, and are incapable of admitting that some of the games just suck.  Full disclosure- I plan on replaying this game at some point in the near future just to see if it’s really as bad as I remember.  I look at it at number 217, and I see Faria above it, and something seems wrong with the world.  But the truth is, it’s the only main-series Final Fantasy I could not bring myself to finish.  It has that awful broken leveling system that encourages party members to attack each other for minor stat increases.  I remember literally just sitting in my apartment (I played it on an emulator for the first time in the late nineties) whaling on my characters over and over and over again to keep raising my attack.  It was boring as all get-out and yet I was paralyzed by the need to keep increasing my stats.  Maybe that’s my fault, but there are other strange things going on in this game, as well.  The dungeons are empty, with long corridors leading to doors that open into empty rooms.  Seriously, you can walk for minutes, enemies stopping you every two steps, only to reach a series of doors that lead to rooms with absolutely nothing in them.  To add insult to injury, you have to walk a bit into each room just to be sure there’s nothing there, guaranteeing another two or three fights before you can leave.  And you can’t just ignore these rooms either, because sometimes there is a new sword inside the seventh door on the left.  Just very strange design choices….. I know it was an experimental title created by the king of experimental RPGs, but it doesn’t make for a very fun game.  The fact that it was named Final Fantasy made the kick in the nads that much worse.

216) Faria (NES)- Ah, what to say about Faria that hasn’t already been said.  Entire forests have been felled to create the paper upon which all the dissertations on the flaws and merits of Faria’s action-based battle system have been written.  All those millions of words on the odd characters with numbers stenciled into their hats and the awkward dialogue and tiny game world.  On the utterly derivative nature of the game, and yet how the designers got it all so….. wrong.  How unbalanced the enemies in the game are or how obtuse the game mechanics are.  There was a time when you couldn’t stop kids from talking about this game- schools would hold assemblies to discuss Faria just so kids would get it out of their system and concentrate on their classwork.  You damn fool! (quick, name the NES game where this classic line is uttered) I was being sarcastic!  Faria is a completely un-noteworthy game.  So unworthy of note that I literally almost wrote nothing about it….. but I did want to mention that it isn’t very good.

A strange and offputting game.....

215) Thousand Arms (PS1)- Speaking of unspectacular….. Thousand Arms was released around the time when a glut of RPGs was starting to appear on every system.  A new RPG needed a hook to stand out.  This one’s hook was the fact that you got to court a bunch of anime girls as an aside to the normal questing.  Other than that, there isn’t much to say.  There are 214 games you should be playing before this, 215 if you also want to play Super Mario Bros. 3 or something.

214) Final Fantasy III (NES)- Some people absolutely love this game.  I absolutely hate this game.  I’d like to try to explain why.  I think the game started well for a NES-era RPG, expanding upon the format of the earlier games in the series by giving a decent story to invest in.  The job system was a revelation of sorts, giving grinders so much to do that they could spend days just swapping between different classes.  The world is big enough, and there is enough to do to keep RPG fans pretty happy.  For half the game, there are no real issues.  But then you hit the second half….. Let’s start by stating the obvious- the encounter rate is beyond ludicrous.  Like many old RPGs, you are fighting a group of enemies every two to five steps.  Now, if you recall, the early Final Fantasies featured a limited number of magic casts, and no way to refill the gauge unless you returned to town to heal.  Okay, so we know you have extremely limited magic use and a million enemies on which you would like to cast magic.  Now, you reach a point when certain enemies will split into two equal copies when hit unless attacked by characters of the Mystic class.  The only purpose of this class is to deal with these “cloned” enemies, and once they are introduced, you are basically forced to either kill them immediately with powerful yet limited magic, or keep an otherwise worthless Mystic in your party at all times.  This is an irritating, but by no means game-breaking problem.  Here is the more irritating, and what I consider game-breaking problem: enemies will CONSTANTLY ambush and back-attack you, and by constantly I mean like three out of every four battles.  When you are back-attacked, you only hit for half damage, while enemies double their power against you.  This makes every single battle with those cloned enemies potentially lethal.  You can no longer count on any characters other than your Mystic to do any damage against them.  If you have your warriors attack, they will barely scratch the enemy, and the thing will split into two equally powerful foes.  Your magic users will run out of MP after the first few fights, and you will likely have to have your sole Mystic scratch the enemies for miniscule amounts of damage while they whale on you with double attack power.  So maybe after getting your ass kicked during the first round of that ambush, you decide that you will run from the fight.  BUT, as with many games of the time, your run rate is very low, and you leave yourself open to further attack.  AND, here’s the thing, the fucking awful, illogical icing on the shit cake- when you try to run, your defense drops to zero and enemies will kill you with a single attack.  Recall that this horrifying process is inexorably playing itself out literally every three out of four fights, and you may begin to realize why this game, while laden with potential, ended up residing in the shit-pile of my heart.

Back Attack.....every friggin' fight.

213) SaGa Frontier (PS1)- This is a game (and series) of unparalleled freedom, little to no guidance, and horribly unbalanced gameplay.  Here is a little story that encapsulates my SaGa experience.  I thought I was building my party the way the game intended, leveling up my character stats and earning better equipment and spells.  Of course, I had no real understanding of how the system could be managed (let alone exploited) and so I often found myself losing to enemies that I felt I should have easily been able to handle.  This culminated in my climbing some mountain and saving myself into a situation in which I couldn’t return to town until I beat some gigantic bird.  I fought the thing and got my ass handed to me.  I fought him again, trying different tactics- magic here, offensive items there.  None of it ever worked- as a matter of fact, I could barely scratch the thing.  I would take away like 100 HP from the guy before he wrecked my entire party.  I could do no better; I kept fighting him and fighting him, unwilling to give up on my save file (20 hours in) just because the game allowed me to become trapped with no way of winning.  Finally, and I mean on what must’ve been my twentieth attempt at fighting him, I just said “fuck it” and cast the one spell I knew could never work on a boss- instant death.  And wouldn’t you know it, the guy just fucking keeled over right there, just like that.  While I was relieved as hell, I also well understood that no good game should ever be so dependent on the vagaries of luck.

212) Tales of Destiny (PS1)- Jeeeeez.  You know, coming up with things to say about 200+ games isn’t as easy as you might think.  Sometimes you just look at the name of the game- Tales of Destiny- and you think to yourself “What the hell does it matter what I say about this crappy game?”.  The only reason people remember this game exists is because it’s part of the Tales series, and a lot of gamers like anime stuff.  This is the worst of the Tales games, and it’s not good at all.  I could list the reasons why, but you could probably just read some of the entries below this one and recognize that all of the games this low on the countdown suffer from the same sorts of problems.

211) Pier Solar (Genesis)- I don’t know how many of you know about this one, as it was only released a few years ago.  If that’s news to you, then rejoice- a new, original Genesis RPG was released just two years ago!  Unfortunately, it isn’t very good.  It has a litany of problems.  Towns are cluttered with objects and you are required to run your character into every single wall to find passages forward.  Sometimes you have to walk through a NPC’s home just to come out the other side to get to the weapon shop.  There are stretches of four dungeons without any place to heal your party.  Inventory space is so limited that you can never have enough healing items.  The story has many plot holes and there are a bunch of grammatical mistakes and errors in diction strewn throughout the inane dialogue.  Enemies ambush you constantly- in one dungeon I was literally ambushed in every battle.  There are flying enemies that can only be attacked by a character with a projectile, and even then it takes four to five rounds to defeat even one of them.  Attack animation is jerky and slow; heaven help the man who has to fight a pack of five enemies who all have area attacks.  That man will want to throw the controller through the television after one battle.  I’m not done yet, even though you get the picture.  Thirty percent of your attacks result in YOU getting poisoned.  Poison status halves your attack and drains half your HP each round.  You will rarely cast magic because it takes multiple rounds to save up the energy required to do so.  Some item descriptions are erroneous.  For example, one weapon description claims it will poison enemies, but the truth is that it poisons YOU.  This one gets points for being a new release, and for trying really hard.  You can tell a lot of effort was put into this one, and sometimes the graphics do look nice.  And the music is pretty good; you might want to give it a listen.  But don’t listen to it while playing.

It looks nice, but it's just not a very good game.

Just a quick note.  I've rejiggered some of the numbers on my countdown, so if you see a repeat entry in a different position, that's why.  Hope you enjoyed!