Title: Resetera's Top 100 Essential RPGs - Voting stage running until July 22nd!
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Ask anyone who's played Mother 3 and you'll get a different description of its contents. A brazen critique of late capitalism in a surrealist shell. A super stylish homage to American pop culture. A heartfelt endorsement of community and nature against the rising wave of unfettered industrialization. Hilarious characters and a battle system that never gets old. The closest JRPGs ever got to Studio Ghibli. Instead of being one of these things, Mother 3 is all of them. No other RPG reaches these lofty heights. This is the closest JRPGs ever got to full scale opera, and I'm not just talking about that famous sequence. Final Fantasy has never shied away from drama, but no other game in the series tells a story using the entirety of its cast and world. Love, death, imperialism...... this game fears nothing. Repetitive areas, dull graphics, over the top voice acting, fuck off who cares. Give me all of that if it means I can have a game like this. This game ties together a meta-narrative about playing the game itself and the body dysmorphia of the actual characters. I mean, how can you not champion this as one of the most important RPGs ever released. how can you choose cold metal over the splendor of the flesh???????????????????????????? If "Song of Storms" was a video game. Lonely and strange, it transports you to a world that you can't ever leave. There are no mysteries left in video games, no stones left unturned, but this is the closest you'll get. Post-apocalyptic fiction is inherently about society. The society that leads to nuclear war, the society that is destroyed by fire and radiation, the society that claws its way out of the wasteland. This is the only series that really understood that what came after is better than what came before. As full of style as any of the other games in the SMT series, but a little bit weirder, a little bit darker...... an essential text for this specific generation of weird emo weebs. So many modern RPG creators talk about making a "sandbox" when the perfect realization of waking up in a strange new world already exists. Like the journeys you day dreamed about as a kid in a boring class. The reason so many people are very attached to this game is because it illuminates the same coming of age moral realization as every other seminal work of 2000s nostalgia. It's still good though. There really isn't a character as compelling as The Nameless One in video games. Planescape: Torment utilizes an A+ greenlight pitch, a fully formed world, and sharp writing............. and surprise, it's fucking great. Who needs enemies when you have friends Give me the wide eyed wonder of this installment over any other Mario RPG. Completely innocent and beautiful. Maybe the best sequel of all time? An incredible work of technical mastery before you even consider the story, characters, and world. This series was supposed to imperfect journeys through thoughtfully designed worlds. After the first installment, it shirked its own destiny, and the industry is worse off for it. Maybe a perfect game, eschewing grind and massive scope for tight pacing. Remember when this seemed futuristic? After Demon's Souls, From doubled down on some of the more crowd pleasing aspects of the franchise and lost a little of what made the first game so memorable. Luckily, through sheer force of will, they walked ass backward into another classic. A slow ramp up into the best second act in RPG history, expanding gameplay, story, and freedom to ridiculous degrees. My vanity entry, a game seemingly forgotten by anyone who wasn't around to play it at release. I simply urge you to play it. --VOTE INFO START— Mother 3 Final Fantasy VI Nier System Shock 2 Demon's Souls Fallout 2 Shin Megami Tensei: Digital Devil Saga The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind Grandia II Planescape: Torment Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3 Paper Mario Baldur's Gate II Mass Effect Chrono Trigger Deus Ex Bloodborne Final Fantasy XII Nier Automata Ultima VII: The Black Gate --VOTE INFO END--
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