This is an interesting year. While I’m certainly a Mega Man Guy, I’m not a big fan of the first one. (killing the yellow devil with the pause exploit is fun, though(that’s MM1, right?)) Zelda II is cool, but it’s got some cruft that keeps me from going back to it as much as I do Zelda 1. And I like the idea of Simon’s Quest, but I’ve never played it for more than an hour. Final Fantasy is one I really want to play, but I don’t know about voting for it. I can predict when I play it, I’ll appreciate what it’s going for, but ultimately still like later FFs more. Maybe I’m wrong, I don’t know yet. That brings me to Dragon Quest II, but in the previous thread I didn’t vote for DQ1 because the Gameboy version is the one I like. Same story here. So I think I’m gonna do something wild and vote for a game I’ve never played from a series I’ve never played, but just looks hella cool:
Phantasy Star
It’s high on my list to play, even higher than Final Fantasy so why not?! I’ve been trying to play more Sega here and there and get myself a more well rounded education.
I’ll vote for Mega Man - in middle school the J2ME port was the only game I had on my flip phone and so I played a decent amount of it on bus rides, or waiting to get picked up from school xD
I always liked that you could pick the order you wanted to play the levels in :)
I’d vote for Final Fantasy 1. It’s a great mix of the crunchiness and severity of your table / computer RPGs, and the streamlining that JRPGs would become famous for as time went on. I played it for the first time not too long ago, so no nostalgia (at least not like direct nostalgia), but I appreciated the difficulty really making you use your resources wisely. Each step, each battle, matters, and it’s less about any individual fights and more about how you route your way from town, to the boss, and then all the way perilously back to town. I even kind of enjoyed certain conventions that some would call outdated, like how if an enemy dies, your character won’t automatically target a fresh one, so you really have to think okay how many hits is it going to take to kill this guy? It’s all very strategic and imaginative.
Also, the art is awesome given what they were working with at the time.
The choice is starting to get tough. Lots of great games in ‘87. At first I thought I was gonna go with Wonder Boy in Monster Land, my favourite game of all time, but in fact the game I love is the 1988 SMS port. I really like Ys, and I suspect if I ever get around to seriously playing Maze of Galious I’ll find it’s great. R-Type is a wonderful game as well, though again I’m most familiar with the SMS port.
So I’m going with Phantasy Star. It’s a beautiful game (as my gameplay photo above shows) that trusts you to figure it out (like a lot of games at the time, admittedly). Modern ports offer automatic mapping, which is fine, but doing it yourself really adds sometime in my opinion. It’s also got a great localisation, particularly for the time (my favourite line: “Somewhere in all this junk is s’posed to be a working robot, but you know how rumors be”).
