Quote:The area of games in which the SNES really took stride was in the role playing game (RPG). The SNES was not the first system to have these games, even NES had a few good ones, but it was on the Super Nintendo that the RPG as we know it today came to be. NES' RPGs, like Dragon Warrior, were long and tedious and offered a very linear story line. Advances were made, such as in the real-time RPG Star Tropics, but only so much could be done with the NES console. The Super Nintendo console, with its 128 Kbytes of RAM and 3.58 MHz CPU, allowed for such memorable games as Secret of Mana, Secret of Evermore, Earth Bound, and Chrono Trigger. These games, some real-time and some turn-based, set the foundation for the modern RPG and though their have been surpassed in a technological sense, it they remain to be some of the finest role playing games of all time.
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I agree. Chrono Trigger is the most fun I've had playing an RPG since Star Ocean 2 and FF7 on the PSX. And that barely even scratches the surface of what the SNES had.
By the way, add Super Mario RPG to that last.
Speaking of SNES RPGs, have any of you played Terranigma? It was only released in Europe and Japan I believe so it's only available in ROM form (or imported) but that game is pure joy. The combat is fun, the plot is incredible, you'll laugh, you'll cry, six thumbs up, way way up. I will use a term not for shock purpose but because it's the honest truth: it's Enix's answer to Chrono Trigger.
I've played it before, but not very much.
I'm currently playing through Chrono Trigger. It is indeed a gem. Some RPGs are missing from that list though: Super Mario RPG, as GR mentioned, and the Final Fantasy series. (Particularly II/IV and III/VI. V was okay, and it wasn't even released on the SNES in America.) The SNES was easily the best system ever made, not just for those RPGs, but for its wide array of great platformers as well.
Does Illusion of Gaia count? That's more of an action game, but it was still awesome.
But, you are a bit premature to say that the SNES's power is what allowed for those games. Surely they wouldn't look or sound as good, and some aspects couldn't be done, namely the sheer number of sprites bit, but the main components of all of those games could be done on the NES. Case in point: Mother.
I submit the most likely reason the SNES is where they got so great is because game makers themselves had progressed, as well as the tools they used (programming languages). Game makers already had the concept of how to make an RPG under their belts when it came time to make some new ones. Not only that, they had some existing code to work with so they had the time to work on new code as well.
I agree that SNES was a great console, but I don't really think the quality of its games was that disproportionately greater than what's out there today. I have a roughly even number of games I really enjoy on almost every console I've ever owned.
You know, I've had Secret of Evermore since Christmas of 2002 and haven't played it even once. I once had it long ago, but then I traded it to my friend. I played very little of it back then. Maybe I should play it sometime, I heard it's really good.
It's good, but if you ask me it falls short of Secret of Mana.
I could name a few things but in the end it comes down to this. SOM was a 3 player game (if you had a multitap). SOE was 1 player, even though it could have been 2...
Yeah, from what little I remember, you played as a kid and his dog. (And the dog would change form depending on what... dimension... you were in.)
Terranigma is the third game in the series that contains Soul Blazer and Illusion of Gaia...
As for the SNES, sure it's a great console, but I don't think I'd say that games were way better back then than ever before or after... some genres clearly advanced over time -- such as racing or sports games -- for instance... I don't know. I know I've said that the N64 has more good games than the Gamecube... SNES vs. N64? Well in some genres it's no contest because of third party abandonment, but looking strictly at the first party titles it's a lot closer... I'm not sure which is better just by that measure.
... I'll try to make a less confusing post (than this one could easily become) by laying out some points...
-NES to SNES vs. N64 to GC - both of these were evolutionary jumps, not revoluionary... but I'd say that the NES-SNES jump was bigger and more influential on gameplay than N64 to GC. (that is, it changed gameplay more than going from N64 to GC did)
-Nintendo has been pretty even with their first-party releases since the SNES... in volume and in overall quality.
-2d gaming was fun. 2d gaming died a young death when 3d came along. Sega learned this the hard way when no one cared about the designed-around-2d Saturn. This is sad. Consoles today push 3d hard, but barely care about 2d and don't make making 2d games any easier, much less actually advance 2d gaming... the GBA was something, but being a handheld it has a lower resolution than the major consoles, and is lacking stuff like easy multiplayer... (3d gaming is great too of course, but it's too bad that it came with the almost complete loss of 2d)
-SNES has by far the most great games that were Japan-only. Star Ocean, Tales of Phantasia and Seiken Densetsu 3 are the highlights, but there are plenty of others. N64 has very few (Sin & Punishment, Bangai-O, and ... um, that's it...). GC has a few too ( the KuruKuru Kururin game, for instance! Or Nintendo Puzzle Collection.), but SNES had more... this is one place where things have advanced -- the companies trust American gamers a bit more now. Not enough, but a bit more... (though on GBA it seems almost as bad as ever, looking at the lengthy list of Japan-exclusives...) Anyway, there is some progress here, but a lot more would be good.
-Nostalgia causes people to overrate things they remember fondly. This helps the SNES along in some ways... to forget the mountains of bad games, for instance? Or the fact that lots of games make you write down passwords to save (or have no saving at all)... or how that 3.5mhz processor was a bit slow and caused slowdown in faster-paced games... or how it was NOT the epitome of 2d graphics -- just look at arcade games of the time, or arcade ports of games from from any time in the '90s for current consoles to see how true that is --... I know, it's a great console, but saying "things will never be better? That's probably not true.
It's true, nostalgia does contribute a lot. Maybe that's my problem--I've barely played any new games and so I'm always saying that the old days of video games were better. I need to expand my horizons a bit more.
Old games were good, but there are a lot of good new games too. And the number of REALLY, REALLY bad games has probably gone down overall...
Well, it seems to me that there aren't as many useless games like "Home Alone" or "Tom & Jerry" these days like there used to be.
I don't necessarily think game are worse now than back in the early 90's, but there certainly are a lot more BAD games now.
Bad? Do you mean 'below average'? Even so, I disagree... there were so many truly abysmal platformers back then, not to mention the legions of average platformers, that overall game quality has without a doubt gone up overall. Though that's certainly not to say that you never see poor games anymore, they usually aren't quite as awful as some used to be...
The PC still sees the occasional utterly horrific title, but consoles, with their liscencing fees and stuff, usually see at games earning at least a 4/10. :) Of course there are exceptions, but my point is that there are fewer of those than there were in the SNES days...
Well actually in SOE you got transported to an artificially created world made by a scientist. The dog was chewing some wires and so he has actually "bonded" with the world, so his form changes based on what part of the world he is in. The boy doesn't have that bond, but he does learn alchemy so he's got that going for him.
Cool... I'll have to play the game sometime. I'm almost done with Chrono Trigger. It's nothing but side quests and Lavos from here.
Don't think too much of it. Great concept but it seems like the people who made the game weren't sure if they should go serious or comedy with it. Now, it may be some sort of cynical joke, but if that's the case, they just didn't make it all that funny. Anyway, the game ends a little abrubtly and even though there's an overworld, and you can fly, there are really only like 5 locations you can land so...
Anyway, the game is good, and you'll have fun, but in the end SOM is the better game to me.