@Coco_pierrot: It was a move away from FF VII and VIII and was the first FF game I played to bring back a solid class system. The games you mentioned were many years before IX.

I'm going to post all the way up to 5 now but I will add in the write ups a little bit later:

No. 11 Final Fantasy VII (PS1)

No. 10 Planescape: Torment (PC)

No. 9 Deus Ex (PC)

No. 8 Baldur's Gate 2 (PC)

No. 7 Final Fantasy VIII (PS1)

No. 6 Rogue Galaxy (PS2)

I trust them from a creative stand out, ending be damned. Plus it wasn't that bad, I was more worried about the boring earth levels and the really empty, PS2-era like scenery. It just looked terrible.

What I'm worried about is how much of the game is going to be released and how much will be held back for DLC and if that DLC will be problematic to the actual story of the game feeling complete. As big a fan of ME as I am, I would not buy this game if they messed around with DLC like EA and Capcom.

I heard about Kult, so I'll give it a go. Probably check for it on steam.

I agree about the time needed to be invested in Diablo II or Diablo like games, which is what I used to love about them. Sadly I don't have that level of commitment to games anymore. It's why I played Diablo II when I did.

In terms of it's sequel, I played it upon originally release and it was an absolute mess.

still not a fan of kickstarter developed games, they often seem like cheap knock offs of the real thing

@pug987: I get that, Diablo II produces so many pretenders that some of them actually turned out to be very good. I quite like Path of Exile too but haven't played it as much as I'd like. Maybe give that a try as a Diablo-esque game.

I was about to get all fan boy-ish on here but then I saw the trailer. It looks a bit too clean, that's not the Planescape vibe at all. Plus, it doesn't look like there's a major studio beind it and that always makes me nervous with the modern habit of indie studios and crowd funding.

@pug987: Thanks.

I get that, a lot of people prefer some of the older TES games to the ones that came after Morrowind and that's cool. It's all opinions after all. Personally, Oblivion was a revelation to me and Skyrim is one of the best RPGs of the modern age. It'll be on my list but I won't say where.

In terms of Trigger, I never said it was the same system as FF4, at least I don't think I did lol But I agree, the battle system in Trigger is better than certain FF games but I prefer IX and XII over trigger in terms of combat...but just a bit. If you had to ask me, I/d probably say Vagrant Story had the absolute best combat for any JRPG, although I haven't played that game in a very long time but just the ability to target specific parts and the fact that it was one of the first main stream JRPGs to really push for a more fluid fight system was great and revolutionary.

If you haven't played nay of the other games I've mentioned, definitely get into Diablo II, it's the most modern and accessible. It can get seriously hard though.

No. 12 Vagrant Story (PS1)

First off, this game just looked so damn good. It's style was sharp and...cool. That's what I first thought when I stuck the disc in my now ageing PS1. Then I started getting deeper into the battle system and it wasn't your typical, JRPG, turn based fighting. No, you moved and attacked, targeting specific body parts and trying to chain together combos. That's right, this was like a beat 'em up in RPG form. That's what my 12 year old head thought anyway. Again, it was cool.

Story wise, I feel the game lacks a bit but it makes up for it tremendous atmosphere, the fun of the combat system and the look. It's also one of the few games where I probably spent hours simply crafting and improving the weapons I had. I'm not much of a crafter, maybe it's because I don't have the patience these days but back then I couldn't stop looking to get that extra range from my weapon or improving the strength that little bit more. Anything to chain more combos and deal more damage.

I feel a lot of RPGs at the time focused more on story and setting and then thought about combat, Vagrant is different. It uses combat as its center piece and it works perfectly.

No. 13 Diablo II (PC)

This was a tough pick for me. I absolutely loved Diablo II on release and still love it to this day, although the Diablo legacy has been really hurt by what I feel is an almost atrocious cash-in of the sequel. But that's not why I almost didn't rank this. Diablo II is a hack and slash adventure with more combat and loot collection than actual RPGing...then again, some may think games like Fallout suffer the same issues. So here I am ranking it, and ranking it above the bottom 5. This is purely based on just how damn addictive the game is/was.

Still to this day, with technically superior hack and slash, loot collection simulators on the market, nothing quite captures the intensity and atmosphere of one of the best sequels ever made. The dungeon progression, the grind, all that loot I keep mentioning, the monsters to fight, it's all been done before and since but never to this level of perfection. Heck, me and my friends from secondary (high for you Americans) school would sit together after a play through and talk for hours about what we'd done, what we'd found, what attacks we had used on which creature(s). Other than the GTA series, I'm not sure if we've ever spent so much time speaking about one game.