I know you didn't really ask for these type of RPGs but I'll list them anyway just because you may end up liking them anyway.

JRPGs: Xenoblade Chronicles, The Last Story, Zelda: Skyward Sword (or any Zelda for that matter except CD-i), Chrono Trigger.

I've heard good things about The Last Story so I may check it out. Sadly I have most of the Bioware games you mentioned. Is Baldur's Gate any good? I was thinking of trying the new enhanced edition they have out.

I would still highly recommend Xenoblade Chronicles and Chrono Trigger to you though those are two of the best JRPGs I ever played. You should especially try to go for Xenoblade Chronicles since it saw a limited print in North America. I absolutely love Skyward Sword it's my favorite Zelda yet followed closely by Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask.

Isn't Chrono Trigger on the SNES? I'll have to check Amazon for a copy.

kinda blew it, the final parts of the game (City in the Sky onwards) felt very rushed you know? Another criticism I have when it comes to Twilight Princess is that it was way too easy.

Chrono Trigger itself is on the SNES, PS1, and DS. Chrono Trigger DS is the best version with the most content though.

Xenoblade Chronicles and the Last Story are both Wii games.

I just picked it up, but haven't had time to play it yet. There is one thing I'm wondering. How "motiony" are the controls? Do they add a lot to the game or take away from it, because the Wii seems to have fall into those two extremes a lot so I was wondering if it might be better to buy a classic controller and play with that.

have a friend who played with the classic controller and had zero problems.

but, if you don't have them already, you could look into the Fallout series. You can get the first two for fairly cheap at a place like GOG, and Fallout 3 and New Vegas you can get the complete packs with all of the DLC missions. I did a complete playthrough of Fallout 3 last year and sank over 100 hours into it.

Or if you want to go *really* old-school you can get "Cthulhu Saves The World" and "Breath of Death VII" for (literally) a couple of bucks. They are in the style of old 8-bit RPGs and "Cthulhu..." is pretty funny (I haven't played "Breath of Death VII" yet).

It's definitely a game with a lot of choices in how you fulfill missions. (including failure - the game is tolerant enough of different approaches that you can piss off every single major and minor faction and still have a path to the endgame) And your actions do have consequences to the world around you. A lot of this is in how the postgame slides describing the future of the various groups play out, but there are also plenty of cases where certain actions will enable or lock out other possibilities, and you will eventually align yourself with one (or none) of three major factions, which will limit your interaction with the other ones (and with the minor factions which have their own alignments and agendas)

Mechanically, it's very much like Fallout 3. A few tweaks, mostly for the better, but it feels pretty much the same. It does have the same problem from an RPG perspective that specialization breaks down later in the game when your character has enough skillpoints to be basically good at everything, especially with the DLC installed.

except that the mods for skyrim are dull as hell, while the ones for oblivion to this day make it a game well worth playing through over.

Even the adds for content suffer from console style garbage, but a lot of that could be oblivion has been around longer.

Skyrim has a better magic item creation system. Oblivion's was broken.

Skyrim has more options for combat.

Skyrim has a much better spell diversity.

The elements in Skyrim are actually different from each other.

Skyrim has better balance between the races.

Skyrim has sprinting.

Skyrim has shouts. Lots of shouts.

Oblivion has better character creation in the beginning of the game.

Oblivion seems to have more quests.

Oblivion seems to have more monster types.

I think Oblivion was bigger overall, as far the map goes. Some of the Oblivion gates had a nice size.

Oblivion has spell creation.

And with the muiltitude of mods out for skyrim, i keep going back to oblivion.

Both are excellent games. Yet to my senses Oblivion while more primitive has that extra play factor for me.


anyways FUS RO DAH

on edit: neither are to played with xbox controller on pc, I have only found one game worth it, and it still in beta.

*sighs, console people* dumbing down games for 8 years now.

There's just no coming back from an arrow in the knee in that game.

I think both are inferior to Morrowind in a lot of ways: plot-line, multiple competitive factions for identical characters (ie. which House to join, whether as a magic user it was better to be Telvanni or Mages Guild, the only game of the three to have "church" factions for healer-classes), the creation of artificial-caps on magical skills (such as effectively reduced the value of alchemy as a skill (offset by the insane weight of alchemy equipment)), the missions were better. I don't necessarily want class or race balancing...it's not as important in a single-player-only game. All told, Morrowind was the best written of the three even if it had a comparatively-weak plot.

Sure Morrowind had its' shortcomings. Some have been addressed with mods (such as reskinning it to take advantage of advances in graphics and improvement of sound quality), some such as the absence of homes you can buy, fast travel and horses simply continue to be annoyances.

I really hoped when they came out with Skyrim that they were going to incorporate the best of Morrowind and Oblivion...but they seem to have doubled-down on everything they fucked up between them in attempts to appeal more to casual gamers.

i don't like jrpgs anymore, but I even I'm really into them right now. You could also go GOG and look up some old school Neverwinter Nights 1 or 2, Icewind Dale 2, etc. If you have an IPAD or steam, check out the AMAZING Avernum series or Geneforge series. Graphics are hard to swallow, but they are astounding game. Especially the remake Avernum: Escape the Pit. I spent more time playing that than Skyrim if you can believe it.

10 bucks on steam, I would pay 5 times that easily. What a fantastic game.

If you have a moderately decent PC you don't need a Wii to play it, can be emulated pretty well with Dolphin.

it's a 130$ on Amazon. That's robbery.

But it's in super high demand. There are other methods to get it, however, that is beyond the scope of this discussion. It's quite good though.

I'm playing Last Story first and it's really good. The story is kind of simple, but I love the characters. The combat is great as well. Honestly, I think this style of combat is perfect for a JRPG. It's more dynamic than traditional turn based, but it's not a carbon copy of WRPG combat systems.

excellent game

Skyrim's rules system + non-robotic, somewhat believable NPCs. Why is this so hard? I see that another DLC is coming for Skyrim. Cool. Lotsa new shiny stuff, but the people I rescue from vampires still can't seem to remember that it ever happened.

EDIT: Dragon Age: Origins has better dialogue.