30 Days of Games Meme PART 2
Sep. 17th, 2010 10:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
slimequest30 Days of Video Games Day Two: The most underrated game you’ve ever played
The last choice wasn't hard at all, but goddamn. I play nothing but underrated/unappreciated/unknown games half the time. That being said, I can think of one game that a number of people actually played, but either didn't understand or didn't appreciate:
SaGa Frontier was released in the U.S. shortly after the whole FF7 craze made RPGs the cool new thing to play. Squaresoft became a company that people began to put a lot of trust in, after all, they made FF7! So here's some other RPG by them, let's play it! OHMYGODWHATISTHISIDON'TEVEN-
Yeah, SaGa's not your typical RPG series. It's usually semi to completely nonlinear, which throws a lot of first-timers off. In this game, you get to choose one of seven characters to begin as, each with their own scenarios that overlap with each other. After a short introductory portion, the rest is left up to you. There is a set last boss for each character, but everything up to that point is wide open for the player to decide. Those parts are actually some of the most fun I've ever had in an RPG. Wandering into a town, recruiting some purple-haired chick with guns and exploring some crashed spaceship thing, grabbing treasure and barely making it out alive? And not because the plot forced me to, but because I wanted to explore and do it myself? That's awesome.
A majority of the playable characters (besides the protagonists) either don't have much of a backstory, or it's a backstory that you have to unravel slowly over the course of several character's scenarios. That contrasts sharply with anything FF7 had to offer, which I'm sure turned a lot of people off who were looking for more of the same. Personally, the random-as-fuck mecha inexplicably named "Rabbit", that can shoot lasers and joins you only if you happen to enter this certain Japanese garden area, is my favorite character because... do I need to explain further?
Even assuming you begin to accomplish things in the game, you might get your ass handed to you repeatedly by bosses you aren't prepared for. SF can be hard, and does require some grinding to get through it. But the ability system ends up becoming something you'd WANT to grind through and build up your ragtag group up with. Swords, guns, martial arts, magic, mech skills and monster abilities are what you have available to you, and you're given a generous amount of freedom to use what you want to use. Making the girl wearing a dress and heels suplex that 30-foot-tall frog? Check. Recruiting the obvious mage guy and making him use guns instead? Check. Equipping your robot with like five swords and three gauntlets and letting god (and math) sort the rest out? Check.
The graphics are sprite-based with prerendered backgrounds, which gives it a more retro feel than a lot of the other 3D PS1 RPGs of the era. There aren't very many FMVs in the game at all, and a lot of the time it just feels like a slightly souped-up SNES game. If nothing else turned off the newly-addicted RPG players of the time, this probably did it.
I remember some magazine reviews giving SaGa Frontier the "worst RPG of the year award" or something along those lines, and I personally remember some people at school complaining about the game and how it wasn't as good as FF7 and some of the other PS1 RPGs of the time. So I've got first-hand knowledge of exactly how unappreciated the game was at the time. Nowadays, either most people don't like it, never played it, or rabidly obsess over it. There's really not much in between.
So, that's why it's my pick for most underrated game, because quite a few people did give it a shot, unlike "random fantranslated SNES RPG #8" which I and 14 other people in the world know about. It has to be rated in the first place to be underrated, right? A sad victim of the times, but admittedly, it's an acquired taste.
The last choice wasn't hard at all, but goddamn. I play nothing but underrated/unappreciated/unknown games half the time. That being said, I can think of one game that a number of people actually played, but either didn't understand or didn't appreciate:
SaGa Frontier was released in the U.S. shortly after the whole FF7 craze made RPGs the cool new thing to play. Squaresoft became a company that people began to put a lot of trust in, after all, they made FF7! So here's some other RPG by them, let's play it! OHMYGODWHATISTHISIDON'TEVEN-
Yeah, SaGa's not your typical RPG series. It's usually semi to completely nonlinear, which throws a lot of first-timers off. In this game, you get to choose one of seven characters to begin as, each with their own scenarios that overlap with each other. After a short introductory portion, the rest is left up to you. There is a set last boss for each character, but everything up to that point is wide open for the player to decide. Those parts are actually some of the most fun I've ever had in an RPG. Wandering into a town, recruiting some purple-haired chick with guns and exploring some crashed spaceship thing, grabbing treasure and barely making it out alive? And not because the plot forced me to, but because I wanted to explore and do it myself? That's awesome.
A majority of the playable characters (besides the protagonists) either don't have much of a backstory, or it's a backstory that you have to unravel slowly over the course of several character's scenarios. That contrasts sharply with anything FF7 had to offer, which I'm sure turned a lot of people off who were looking for more of the same. Personally, the random-as-fuck mecha inexplicably named "Rabbit", that can shoot lasers and joins you only if you happen to enter this certain Japanese garden area, is my favorite character because... do I need to explain further?
Even assuming you begin to accomplish things in the game, you might get your ass handed to you repeatedly by bosses you aren't prepared for. SF can be hard, and does require some grinding to get through it. But the ability system ends up becoming something you'd WANT to grind through and build up your ragtag group up with. Swords, guns, martial arts, magic, mech skills and monster abilities are what you have available to you, and you're given a generous amount of freedom to use what you want to use. Making the girl wearing a dress and heels suplex that 30-foot-tall frog? Check. Recruiting the obvious mage guy and making him use guns instead? Check. Equipping your robot with like five swords and three gauntlets and letting god (and math) sort the rest out? Check.
The graphics are sprite-based with prerendered backgrounds, which gives it a more retro feel than a lot of the other 3D PS1 RPGs of the era. There aren't very many FMVs in the game at all, and a lot of the time it just feels like a slightly souped-up SNES game. If nothing else turned off the newly-addicted RPG players of the time, this probably did it.
I remember some magazine reviews giving SaGa Frontier the "worst RPG of the year award" or something along those lines, and I personally remember some people at school complaining about the game and how it wasn't as good as FF7 and some of the other PS1 RPGs of the time. So I've got first-hand knowledge of exactly how unappreciated the game was at the time. Nowadays, either most people don't like it, never played it, or rabidly obsess over it. There's really not much in between.
So, that's why it's my pick for most underrated game, because quite a few people did give it a shot, unlike "random fantranslated SNES RPG #8" which I and 14 other people in the world know about. It has to be rated in the first place to be underrated, right? A sad victim of the times, but admittedly, it's an acquired taste.
