What makes an RPG mediocre or downright terrible? Sure, everyone knows of the classics RPG games such as Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy, Grandia, or Pokemon. These games feature great game-play mechanics,fantastic music, and/or a great story. In the late 90's and early 2000's RPGs were everywhere thanks to the popularity of Final Fantasy VII on the Playstation. Some of these RPG's were pretty good and others were atrocious. I was 10 years old when I started to love RPGs and I would play any game I could get so quality didn't really bother me as long as it had basic RPG elements. It was during this age that I completed some really awful RPG's such as Beyond the Beyond and Quest 64 to name a few.
This got me thinking about the question I posed above and I decided to get help from a few friends who thankfully volunteered to play RPGs that were considered either mediocre or abysmal according to various media sites. I will chronicle some of their experience as well as get feedback about the games they are forced to tolerate. So we picked a total of 12 games we have access to from all generations of gaming. Justin Belding, Tamel Edwards, and I will each get 4 games to play and we must play all 4 games and finish at least 2 of them with some exceptions to that rule (games marked with a *). We rolled a 20 sided dice to choose the games and the results are as follows:
Justin:
Breath of Fire 4
Meh....
Final Fantasy 4: The After Years
Beyond the Beyond*
Super Ninja Boy
Tamel:
Wild Arms 2
More meh....
Granstream Saga
Lufia: Fortress Of Doom *
Blue Dragon
Sterling:
Infinite Undiscovery
Final Fantasy 2
Saga Frontier 2
Quest 64*
I spent $90 on this turd...
Games marked a * are considered either exceptionally bad or time consuming so if either of us chooses to finish one of these games then I consider the quota for completed games met. I still want each game to be experienced for a quick synopsis. I will capture some gameplay with commentary for certain games in the future. This will be a somewhat long project but I want to just examine certain things about what makes a game enjoyable or detestable. Can we find a hidden gem? Appreciate what a game developer was trying to do? I hope to find out some common threads or interesting ideas about games in general from this experiment.
Stay Tuned.
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