Top Eleven: Japanese RPGs

Lately I've been playing a lot of Eternal Sonata (review to come once I can find someone to help me discuss the absolutely insane outfits these characters wear), and I managed to get two other people I know interested in playing it.  The question then came up, "What are you favorite Japanese RPG (jrpg) games?"

Now, I could've done this as an Ask Erik, but then I was afraid it'd get lost in the shuffle.  Titling it a "top eleven" makes more sense, in my eyes, because it is, at its core, a list.

I'm also amazed I haven't done this list before, because I've played a lot of these games over the years.

Now, one has to ask "what makes a role-playing style video game a "Japanese RPG?""  Well, there are a few qualifiers.

The first of which is "at least one person needs to have an absolutely ludicrous costume and/or weapon.
The more characters that look like they gathered everything they own from the blown up ruins of Party City, the better."

Final Fantasy IV

I've been known to say that the Final Fantasy franchise needs to end.  I still believe this, if just because, grammatically speaking, the idea of something having the word "final" in it and then having numbers at the end just makes my brain itch.

It's partly why I had such a problem with the Final Destination series.  That, and it was mind-numbingly dumb.  In video games, you had things like Last Blade 2, Last Ninja 2, and two different Last Half Of Darkness games, which I guess if you put them together is the whole darkness?

There's also a fighting game called Last Bronx which takes place in Tokyo.  I don't even know how that works.

But that isn't to say I haven't liked Final Fantasy games.  In fact, I've loved a few of them, even if they weren't truly Final Fantasy games.  One of the first RPGs I ever played was Final Fantasy Adventure on the original Game Boy, even though it was actually a game in the "Mana" franchise.  Final Fantasy Mystic Quest is a game I played through to completion, and I even played some of Final Fantasy IV back when it was called Final Fantasy II.

Don't ask.

However, I got stuck in one area of the game and was young enough that I had never learned to have more than one save file in case I got hosed, so I had to quit the game.

Having now played it again on the Nintendo DS, I have to ask myself, does it hold up?  Is the story still as good?  Do the two little kid characters still bother me?

Top Eleven: Bottom Eleven Of 2013

Is there really any better way to address the changing of a year than to completely fixate on everything that happened in the previous year?  Who cares what might come up in the following 31,536,000 seconds when we can stare back nostalgically like someone unaware of an oncoming bus heading towards them.

But hey, how are we going to manage to make the future better if we don't remember our regrets from the previous year?  It's why I'm doing my Top Eleven Bottom Eleven Of 2013, the things I covered in this blog that frustrated me, drove me nuts, or just infuriated me with either how hard it was to write about, how painful it was to watch, or just something that I really didn't want to do.

I hope my suffering was worth it.

But first, of course, we're going to cheat a little.

Ask Erik: Episode Thirty!

Normally here I fill in the standard two paragraphs about having a vault of useless information and positing some questions of which two tend to be ones that require thought and the other is something completely random.  However, seeing as how this is my thirtieth "Ask Erik" it feels a bit like a milestone.  Maybe it's because my "Ask Eriks" are officially approaching middle age.  Maybe it's that I'm also just three posts away from my 200th post since I first created this blog.

Either way, today seems like a good day to do something special, so I'm going to answer two questions, both of which were given to me on Facebook.  Two questions so nerdy, I might spontaneously grow tape on the bridge of my glasses.

Let's rock.