I think lists are good when they’re controversial and contrarian, but I think that effect is really really washed out when dealing with a popular ranking of ‘best games’, even in this community.
Yeah I’m overstating by like .1% how gamefaqs the list is now (and deus ex is literally a part of the gamefaqs-y-ness, but so is nocturne, chrono trigger, and ico, not to mention literally everything else except puyo puyo series maybe)
I’m not mad or think that the effort is bad, I just think that the list went exactly as I predicted before it even began.
It is not my best habit to go “I told you so” so I’m sorry about doing that in every week’s thread.
But frankly, Deus Ex is better than Nocturne because its trashier. Nocturne is too polished and professional and inviting. It’s the Iphone to Deus Ex’s Apple Newton.
Here’s a real one: can someone make an argument for Chrono Trigger more than it is pretty good and all the parts work? Like be real do the emotional parts make you emotional? When the music swells does your heart swell? I played it heavily as an adult but also far too long ago (right before or after earthbound now that I think about it) and my Insert Credit Forums opinion at the time was it was The Best Saturday Morning Cartoon Video Game.
I’ve also bought a Japanese copy like 4 times meaning to play it and then haven’t. It is almost the only AAA SFC JRPG I haven’t played in Japanese.
Like I should be clear it is absolutely the best of it’s contemporaries and shortlist for best of JRPGs. But maybe (if it wasn’t clear) “The Best Isn’t Good Enough (For Me)” Hinge Remix.
It’s well paced and makes me smile, two qualities that very few jrpgs manage together.
(the bad pacing: the prehistoric chapter makes me lose so much interest during replays. The future chapter isn’t a problem tbh because Robo is such a charmer)
Emotionally the core comes from Chrono Trigger’s subversions for me. Killing off Chrono is pretty ballsy (I don’t care at all about the character on an emotional level) and the game constantly does this kind of thing throughout which keeps you engaged (court scene, Magus, fighting literal save points etc). It’s the opposite of the tropes that basically make you roll your eyes as you tally up how much you’re willing to tolerate. You think ‘if that can happen then what else is waiting round the corner?’.
The emotional resonance of the narrative and music have always been secondary to that core but I don’t think this makes it a lesser game.
I love when lists mix together popular works with niche creations. I’m reminded of a Top Ten Films of 1957 list compiled by Cahiers and they listed not one, but two Frank Tashlin movies next to Bunuel, Bergman, and Fellini. I mean, they were totally on the right track because Frank Tashlin is a comedic genius and directed the best Jerry Lewis films–yes, better than Jerry’s own directed films. Maybe this isn’t a fantastic example because nobody remembers The Girl Can’t Help It now, but they absolutely should.
And this is why these kinds of lists put together by an aggregate of people will always result in bickering and some people feeling like the list is unsatisfactory: you can’t guarantee the criteria you are personally evaluating against are a) the same as other people and b) something everyone else even cares about.
It shouldn’t be a surprise to many people on this forum from the way that I talk that I mostly don’t engage with games for narrative. My two main evaluation criteria for games I play are “hit button feel good” and/or “how engaging are the gameplay systems/the core game loop”.
Ico would never stand a chance on my personal ranking because it isn’t trying to be that kind of game, and I am not even in the market for that kind of game. I get on paper why Ico is a notable game, but I have no personal interest in actually engaging with it, so it would feel dishonest of me to vote for it.
That’s not to say I wouldn’t recommend Ico to someone who is into that kind of thing, but since the audience of this list is unknown, I’m not tailoring my recommendations for anyone in particular. I’m just asking myself “which of these would I rather play” and seeing where things end up. That’s also why I’ve been relatively quiet in these threads, there isn’t any particularly deep logic to anything I’m doing.
I think you would have more of an argument against Chrono Trigger if this was explicitly a game about impactful or notable games with stricter voting criteria than just putting together a list of “top 64* games” with the criteria left up to the voters’ interpretation. But again:
Like Bachelor said, if this list isn’t to your particular taste, nothing’s keeping you from making your own. I don’t necessarily mean a personal list either, make a thread with a clearer rules system and crowdsource recommendations if you want. One thing I really liked as an SB1 lurker was the amount of different recommended game lists with distinct criteria, and each one approached recommendations from a different angle. I think that had a lot of value, and definitely contributed in expanding about how I approach evaluating games. A lot of that has died down since SB2, and I think it would be cool if it came back in some way.
(also I hope someone is compiling a list of links to all these threads because searching for them is absolute hell, especially since the naming scheme changed midway through)
this is interesting to me because one chunk of why i like ueda games is that they are “hit button feel good” games to me. it’s the weight with which the characters in each of these games move and stumble around that does it. it’s not accurate control, but it does make some part of my brain light up, like, this FEELS great.
i’m not saying you are wrong, just that it occurs to me that what “hbfg” means depends on the response you want from the buttons. and what i want is the feeling of weight moving around, wether we are talking about gimmick, mario 64 or ico.
My personal ranking would be really bizarre because I have strong feelings for older games based on other factors at the time I played them. I mean some games will never click with me no matter how good or bad they are, but others were just the right amount of good or bad enough combined with a particular unrelated emotional high or low at that specific time.
I’ve been trying to keep those feelings out of my voting decisions, but I wasn’t able to for games like Nier and Quake. I do still genuinely feel like those are both incredibly good games regardless of my emotional state at the time of first playing through them.
I’m not sure what I’m trying to say here. Maybe I’m just a middle-aged dude who never matured emotionally? That’s probably not very unique at all.
Like… I don’t know how to exactly phrase this in the nicest way so apologies for its jagged edges, but this list/project is so designed to be aimed at SB itself rather than of any use for a theoretical outsider that said argument legitimately confuses me? As a weird thing for all of us to talk about and mess around with it is personally fine… but we’re also on an individual level often voting on games we have never actually played based on completely idiosyncratic reasons, that’s less than useless to anyone else. To use a specific example I’d guess maybe 10-15% tops of the people here have ever used a gameboy camera and I believe it won multiple battles, if you are in the least bit concerned about how the final list would work for a visitor how can you even begin to square that. How do you even begin to argue for the worth of it to an outsider when a large portion of the contests were decided by people who never played one or both games?
This isn’t to shit on this as a project, again it’s been fun and I think many of us got a lot out of it. That said, I would actively argue that it’d be better to hide from others than make it easily findable as it ain’t built for that in the least, it never was.
As someone new to this forum, I’m hesitant to vote/discuss these games in these threads since it feels like a personal SB project that you’ve been working on for some time. I thought it was more like a snapshot census of where these games stand in this particular moment since you’ve all talked about most of these games to death (don’t mean that to be snarky or w/e, I think it’s nice when a group of friends/community can do that). For what it’s worth, it’s fun to read through and this list made me pick up Nocturne. (I just can’t jive with the setting in most jrpgs. I have fun with the shin megami tenseis, but the 50 hours of game seems like an impossible task most of the time)
I think several of people here would agree with me that the discussion and story sharing part of this is the best part.The ultimate winners of polls are kind of secondary to that. I’d love to hear what you have to say if there’s ever a game here that you personally connect with.
sb has a tendency toward navelgaze, hence all the metacommentary about not only the games on the list but what is the purpose of the list, etc, but yeah, the point is just to generate discussion about the games on the list. I’d intended with every new round to make a full post about each matchup but I am old and tired. Anyway talk! Vote! Voting is fun
