But that would be insanity. I must have been mistaken.

As for Sega while I agree the GREAT games were few and far between- most of the great ones are available now for other consoles including Phantasy Star 4. While I didn’t like the first three in the series – this was my first taste of manga/anime storytelling. It was a good story and a sci-fi feel. If you haven’t played it then you should at least give it a shot if you like RPGs. (plus you don’t need to play parts 1-3 to appreciate 4.)

As for FFX-2 I really liked it. Then again I enjoy pretty pretty Dress up and the combat was amazing. I wanted all FF games to follow that flow. They didn’t….

As for Shadow…. Take him or leave him honestly. I love the Sonic series but only until recently have they returned the love I gave them in my childhood by releasing two new pretty good games. I mean Sonic Generations and Sonic Colors of course. I really couldn’t be bothered for the others because they felt so untrue.

FFX-2 has a FANTASTIC battle system… and that’s all I’m going to say about it.

I loved Majora’s Mask. After playing OoT so many times, playing something new with more or less the same graphics felt exciting. Wind Waker is awesome and anyone that disagrees must play the game again and again and again until they like it.

I played Legend of Legaia during my “Play ALL the PSX RPGs” phase. The battle system was fun and the story was ok. I don’t have any particularly strong feelings about it. It does strike me as odd that everyone I talk to about this game says it’s really hard.

You didn’t like any Genesis game? Did you try Phantasy Star IV?

We couldn’t do that in the SNES days due to it existing in The Time Before Internet. Years later in college my new JRPG gaming friends and I bonded over our favorite games. Final Fantasy II? Check. Chrono Trigger? Of course. Then someone mentioned Secret of Mana, which I hated. Loathed. It was the buggiest SNES game I owned, the graphics were ugly goofy-looking rainbow-vomit, the leveling system was broken and required grinding by casted the same spell on the same enemy 100 times, hit detection was a joke making it fail as a realtime game, it was the only RPG I ever sequence-broke (in more than one place, because the game was that buggy), and the music was so irritating it was the only SNES game I played muted. Also, everything else negative that’s been said about the game in the article and comments are all true. Secret of Mana is the worst JRPG on the SNES, and I thought this was a universal truth for 7 years until Asians in college told me I was alone in this opinion.

I still cannot understand how anyone could not hate Secret of Mana. As an action adventure game it was worse than Link to the Past in every way possible. As an RPG it was worse than every other JRPG on the system in every way possible. You get to use a chakram like Xena. That’s the only positive thing I can think to say about the game.

I happen to think that the combat is actually pretty good in SoM. The game can actually be fairly difficult in the beginning (Tiger boss at the witch’s palace, anyone?) but gets very easy once you gain access to some of the more broken spells (the guaranteed critical hit and hp absorb weapon spells the girl receives from Luna essentially remove all challenge from the game if you choose to abuse them). Alas, my opinion of the game is certainly tainted by nostalgia because it was my first action RPG experience. I got the game when I was 8 and my brother and I played the crap out of it until FFVI came out, which unsurprisingly became my favorite RPG of all time.

My biggest problem with Secret of Mana was that I’ve lost several hours worth of playtime because one of the characters would get glitched into a wall and I’d lose all the grinding I did. The second biggest would be that the weapon upgrade system was retarded broken like the leveling a magic spell in Final Fantasy II.

Probably the best thing about FFX was the battle system and that’s probably true about FFX-2. The thing about FFX-2′s battle system (which was stolen from Grandia wholesale) was that timing mattered. If you struck enemies as they were about to attack your party member it interrupted them. Which is something I hadn’t seen before in RPGs. I never finished the game because I was on level ~80 of the Via Infinito optional bonus dungeon having my ass handed to me over and over by the mega boss and gave up. But despite the, in retrospect, extremely creepy story I did enjoy my time with it. And if you tell anyone I said that I’ll call you a filthy, filthy, filthy, filthy liar.

Majora’s Mask has the honor of tying Kingdom Hearts 2 for most Pooptactically Shittacular Prologue in the History of All Fiction. If you have preternatural patience enough to weather that torrential onslaught of terrible it actually ends up being one of the better 3D Zelda games. The three day mechanic is interesting. Pretty much all of the boss fights I ended up completing with mere minutes to spare. I recommend playing it with a Zelda Wiki open alongside, though. I don’t think Nintendo hit their stride in 3D Zelda until Windwaker. Which is a great game that people hated the hell out of because of it’s art style. Which, ironically, is one of the best-looking last gen games as it turns out.