Best RPGs of All Time

[Head Mutant]

We'll start a series of these threads, but no need to do them all at once. Let's start with a genre near and dear to me -- role playing games. What are your five all-time favorites? Ones you consider to be absolute classics?

For me (and this is hard):

(1) Final Fantasy VII

Yes, let's get past the "there is no real RPing in RPGs, especially the Final Fantasies" and dismiss the semantics. FF7 was so powerful of a game to me, with a great story and an absolutely addicting gameplay. I never before buying that game actually secluded myself for three DAYS because I was so hooked playing something, but this one just broke the mold. Plus, the nifty mid-game twist was a shocker most people were talking about for years afterward.

(2) Fallout 2

A toss-up with the original Fallout and the spiritual ancestor of Wasteland, Fallout 2 is a superb RPG in every way. Great character system, loads of freedom, choices, good and bad paths to take, and plenty of dark humor. Plus, after you beat the main story, they showed a series of epilogues that reflected how the world changed in various areas based on your decisions during the game. Small but poignant.

(3) Chrono Trigger

STILL one of the most replayable games of all time. Refined the Squaresoft RPG on the SNES to brilliance with the "Dream Team" of developers... terrific gameplay, a fun time-travelling storyline, and multiple endings that encouraged replay.

(4) World of Warcraft

Yeah, I'll include online MMORPGs here... even with the grind and other typical MMORPG weights, WoW continues to enthrall and impress me well over a year after I first started playing it. The cartoony world is rich, contains loads of lore and stories, and the game is just sheer fun to play. Can't wait for the expansion pack.

(5) Baldur's Gate 2

I almost put down KOTOR, but then remembered BG2. I might go back and play this soon, it's Dungeons and Dragons' finest hour in video games, and a classic for the ages. A spectacular story with gameplay that could last you hundreds of hours easily. Plus, and this is important, BOO! The hampster!

[Spiderdancer]

I know lots of people love the D&D games, but I couldn't stand Baldur's Gate. Couldn't stop squinting at the tiny characters. Same problem I had with Starcraft even though I loved the Warcraft games. But those aren't RPGs. My favorite RPG is obviously Morrowind, as you might tell from my utterly failed attempt at an Oblivion thread.

I like that this game has so many character variations and races you can play, including some that do NOT look like caucasians with pointed ears and ponytails. (Far too many Caucasian races still - I think it was really unnecessary to have Bretons, Nords AND Imperials as well as three different kinds of Elves - but it's progress. And I LOVE the Argonians.)

I like the huge game verse and the open-ended gameplay. I like the pickpocket feature and the way you can create your own enchanted items and potions. I like all the billion mods you can get and the fun I'm having learning about leveled lists and the data files directory while I discover them. I'm a detail freak. Morrowind is a detail freak's kind of game. And the graphics are such that you can actually see what your character looks like AND what's going on on the screen, which I'm getting increasingly pickier about as my computer gets better.

I can't wait for Oblivion, which is supposed to vastly improve the combat system. Exciting.

[DarthToad]

In no particular order

Final Fantasy X
Chrono Trigger
Super Mario RPG
Final Fantasy VII
Final Fantasy VIII

Notice that three of those have the same first two words. I remember a long time ago I was lookng online and I saw a thread that called Squall "whiney." I think that has become a general insult for a character a geek doesn't like even if it doesn't make sense. How can a character that barely speaks be called whiney? Therefore I ban this word from henceforth ever being used again, or you will be attacked by law ninja! I have spoken!

[Al]

Aw, don't be so whiney ;D

My five:

Final Fantasy VI
Final Fantasy IV
Secret of Mana
Chrono Trigger
Knights of the Old Republic

Admittedly, nothing really new here, but that's because it's true. FFVI had the most memorable characters, but IV had a better plot and a higher percentage of people I actually cared about. Plus IV has the whole "spoony bard" thing going for it. VII never held much of an interest for me, possibly because most of the plot was spoiled for me, but even beyond that I just felt the game was lacking a lot of the freedom that the series had been building towards.

Secret of Mana and Chrono Trigger are two of the most addicting games I have ever put my hands on (Donkey Kong Country 2 also falls into this catagory, but that's a different thread altogether). SoM was simple, yet surprisingly deep in everything it did. On the same wavelength, the characters managed to be both totally archetypal but completely unique, and between the final battle and the game's ending, I found my thirteen-year-old self a quivering emotional wreck. (Flammie! ... )

Chrono Trigger, on the other hand, was so remarkably complex, funny, and replayable that it remains the only game I can reminisce about with friends the way I can talk about college with old roommates. In 8th grade, we *lived* this game. I read the game manual to tatters, right down to the epilepsy warning and 'how to insert this game into the SNES' diagrams. I drew pictures of the characters in study hall and kept them in a notebook. I wrote fanfics and posted them; first on a bbs and eventually on the fledgling internet. It evolved our conversations into deep (well, 8th grade deep) dialogues about time travel, inappropriate ideas about Lucca and Robo's offscreen activities, and awed expressions of disbelief as we learned that Ozzie Slash and Flea were'nt just enemy names pulled from a hat. I still can't believe they won't make a third one. *That* would be a system selling game in my book.

Last is KOTOR, which blew away the already high expectations I had had. I remember watching Revenge of the Sith opening night, and seeing Anakin and Obi Wan leap from their fighters and start hacking up droids, and thinking to myself: Wow, George Lucas has finally made lightsabers uninteresting. KOTOR makes them interesting; beyond that, it reminded me why I found lightsabers so incredibly cool. Of course, it goes beyond simple reinvorgoration of things that already existed. It has characters you can root for, which is standard, but it does what I think is the mark of a truly great RPG, it gives you playable characters who annoy the living Force out of you *cough*Carth*cough* while actually adding to the fun of the game. It's got a twisted plot that does a good job of giving the illusion that it's bending to your whim. It's got one of the greatest reveals I've ever played through in my entire life, one that made me swear repeatedly in increasingly agitated tones until I believe I was shouting at the screen alone in my room. I beat this game in 45 hours over the course of 3 days- that's an absurd amount of time for a grown man to invest in a bunch of pixels. It is a truly, truly phenomenal example of the genre.

Al