Sven

[Forgot this, apologies] Bucket: I can see leaving the GB games out (even though FFLII is outstanding enough to be put up there with the SNES trinity and is a much better choice for a 3D DS remake than FFIV), but for its incredible number of flaws Mystic Quest is still a Final Fantasy game.

(Even if its status has been diluted somewhat in recent years by Square's whoring out of the FF name to every spinoff they want to try and pop a couple dozen extra sales for.)

maxx: You pretty much hit the nail on the head. FFVII was "my first Final RPG" to a lot of people, which is what created the blind fanboy love. About the only good thing you can say about it these days is "well, at least they didn't screw it up as badly as they did the next one."

As a contrast, the only bad thing you can say about VI is that Square went out and topped itself with Chrono Trigger (well, and that the Bum Rush unbalances the game the second you get it).

But compared to what came afterwards... yeah, "shining light" is a pretty good way to describe it. Give me an actual well-developed, reasonably mature storyline over juvenile nerd-fantasy caricatures and a sh(l)ock value death any day of the week and twice on Sundays.

The Chrono Trigger / Super Mario RPG combination really showed how these type of things should be handled... which is what made their presence in FFVII even more depressing.

I especially like how the portable Mario RPGs treat the random battles, where the ability to gain an advantage / avoid a disadvantage is totally up to the skill of the player. That's how you keep the player interested in levelling, not wandering around in the hope that you'll encounter the one monster that gives you a disproportionate amount of gold needed to buy that next big item.

(Not that I MEAN to bash Final Fantasy I, but... c'mon, anyone who didn't hate having to pound on random monsters near Elfland for hours is lying.)

>Next the villain pack, having dr.doom is a cool idea, but since he is the big bad in the game, how could he be a playable character?<

Two words (or one, depending on the writer):

Doom. Bot.

Would've been nicer to have one of Koei's more populist games (Aerobiz: Supersonic immediately comes to mind), but this isn't bad.

As for the 800 NES / SNES games thing... the rights for probably 50% of those, if not more, are in limbo and / or the companies themselves no longer exist. That makes the VC being "complete" impossible.

2011? Heck, the portable market's close to being more lucrative *now* - the DS + PSP combo usually accounts for 50%+ of the Japanese market (easier to do, since they're only fighting against two matching consoles), they're both still doing rather well in North America and Europe... well, we never see any numbers from Europe so let's ignore them like always and move on. :)

I don't think it's possible to catch up with the PS2, since that thing still sells well and has market penetration in countries where Nintendo doesn't feel comfortable doing business.

Well, Aki can do no wrong in my eyes (DJ:FFNY was one of the best games of the past generation, and the No Mercy / VPW2 games held the same status on the N64), so a solid YAY from this corner.

>Any system with Final Fantasy and Metal Gear will dominate in Japan. <

Neither of those series is close to the importance and / or cultural relevance of Dragon Quest... and Sony's lost that.

I'd agree with the "Sonic was always somewhat broken" statement, since there IS a big contrast between the level layouts and how you're basically forced to play the game: one says "explore all of this to find the stuff we've hidden!" and the other says "go fast and don't stop to think."

I do think that Sonic Adventure got a bit of a bad rap, though: everyone was expecting it to be Sega's answer to Mario 64, and that obviously wasn't going to happen. If you play it with no expectations, it's fine.

Also, enough with the sidekicks. No one outside the core fanbase (who have been buying all the horrible games over the years anyway) cares about the anime or any plotlines or characters derived therefrom. If you're going to make a second player character, just come to the conclusion Nintendo did a couple of decades ago: Luigi should be fundamentally the same as Mario. Just give Shadow looser controls and a higher jump and there you go - banish Tails, Kunckles and the rest to the bad idea scrapheap.

(It's telling that Nintendo never returned to the Mario 2 format, as successful as that game was in defining Toad and Princess as characters; they sort of intrinsically knew that the game was being diluted by taking the focus too much off Mario and Luigi.)

As noted... Sonic's getting as close to irrelevancy as Mega Man was around the time of the third set of BN games. Sega has a *very* small window to change that, but they're going to need to re-think their entire philosophy.

>Isn't that picture of Izzy, the Atlanta 1996 Olympics mascot?<

That it is. My sister had a stuffed toy of that hideous thing.