The Ten Worst RPGs I've Ever Played

I've been playing RPGs ever since I got my first console game for christmas. It was a Sega Genesis and I had to share it with my sister. It came packed with Sonic The Hedgehog, and we each got our own game as well. Hers was Ecco The Dolphin, my father got himself some tank simulation game whose name I can no longer recall, and I got... Fatal Labrynth. And thus begin my relationship with horrible RPGs.

The following is a list of the ten worst RPGs that I have ever played. They are listed solely in order of my memory, but the worst ones are indelibly burned into my brain. Thus, the worst will probably be up top. Unless it's so bad that I've almost completely blocked it from memory, in which case, it will be on the bottom. Very helpful, I know.

1) Fatal Labrynth (Genesis). You are the only one who can retrieve the HOLY GOBLET (yeah you heard me right) from CASTLE DRAGONIA (who writes this stuff) and save the world from darkness. Enter the 30-level tower and fight your way to the top by walking up monsters and letting the game attack for you! Oh the excitement. Will your hit land or miss? Will you deal enough damage to slay the beast or will it be able to counter-attack? Will you care after you've done this five billion times? Will the friggin music in this stupid tower ever change?! Hey dumbass Dragonia, how about changing the tapes in here once in awhile?! I actually made it all the way through to the end boss without dying of boredom. I gave up on trying to defeat him, though. Just wasn't worth the effort.

2) Lagoon (SNES). Another action/rpg. Why do they seem to suck the most? You are a funny-looking squished-down character who carries a tiny little knife. You can equip other weapons, but you will still be fighting with a tiny little knife in your hand. You've got the Silver Sword, you say? Looks like an ickle butter knife to me! So go on up to a monster and take an ickle swing at him with your ickle sword. What's that? You just got stomped because you had to get right up on him to attack him? Well that's what you get for bringing a butter knife to a sword fight! If you're tired of all of that fighting, and just want a quick end, you can always throw yourself into a bottomless pit. You'd rather jump over them? Too bad, you'll fall in whether you want to or not! So you've managed to get all the way to the boss, and you've found some magic along the way. At least you won't have to hack at the boss with your ickle butter knife, you can blast him with some magic, right? Um, no, you can't use magic against the bosses. Why? Because that would be fun. There is no fun to be had in this game! Did I forget to mention the plot? That's because there isn't one. You go from town to town, helping people out. And that's about it. Real exciting. The only good thing about this game is the music that is played during the introduction/title screen. I wish I could find it on a cd or something. It was really quite good. Also, unlike most of the games on this list, I actually beat this one.

3) Beyond The Beyond (PSX). Wow did this game blow chunks. It was the first RPG to be released on the Playstation. We would have to wait awhile before actually getting GOOD rpgs like Suikoden and Wild Arms. In the meantime, there was this steaming pile. The story was boring, there was almost no direction (wandering around lost took up a large portion of playtime), and every two steps led to another random battle with an insanely difficult group of baddies! As much fun as having your teeth pulled and then gargling with urine. This is open-ended gameplay at its finest: a whole world open to you to wander aimlessly around in with no purpose or destination. It would have been a lot of fun if the game wasn't so frustrating and boring.

4) Saga Frontier (PSX). Speaking of open-ended gameplay where you wander around only to get your ass kicked for stumbling into the wrong dungeon, we have Saga Frontier from Squaresoft. You get to choose which character's story to play as (there are a total of seven to choose from) each with their own storyline. I'm assuming that at some point all of these storylines converge, but I have no way of knowing because I never finished a single story. I was bored senseless and lost for most of the game. Where am I supposed to go next? What am I supposed to be doing? Why am I supposed to be doing this? Hey, here's a dungeon! Oh it's the end boss dungeon and I just died. Swell.

5) Shadow Madness (PSX). This game is really sad. There's a great game trapped inside it struggling to get out. The battle is poignant to watch. Yet, in the end, the bad game wins and you are stuck with crap. How truly heart-breaking. Anyone who either says that a) a great story makes a great game, or b) it's all about the graphics needs to be set down with a copy of this game and forced to play it until they cry "uncle"! The writing, plot and dialogue are all spot-on. The graphics are a beauty to behold, some spots are just pure joy to look at. But the gameplay is weak and tedious, and the player is soon overcome with boredom. When a certain member of your party is no longer with you and you have to go back over a bunch of places you've already been, you may very well simply give up. That's exactly what I did, and I don't regret the decision one iota. The weird floating head character was the only character in the game I actually liked. When he was gone, there was no reason to keep playing. His quips reminded me of the two old geezers in the balcony in The Muppets. Without him, the game was a total dull chore. I quit.

6) Drakkhen (SNES). Isn't it fun when you get a whole party of adventurers and can only control one of them, and even that one you can barely control? Isn't it great to sit back and watch as they flail their arms wildly in an attempt to defeat some creature? Do my sarcastic hypothetical questions make you want to play this game? I would guess the answer would be a resounding "no." In Drakkhen, you and your comrades wander around in the desert looking for castles. Why? I don't remember. I didn't remember after I went to the second castle. But obviously I was supposed to get inside it and do... something. And I did it, even though I couldn't remember what "it" was. Go me! There's always some trick to gaining entrance to each castle, and once inside you might possible get to fight one or two creatures. But most of the game is spent wandering around the desert, hoping the weird star thing doesn't come down and kill you. Eventually you're strong enough to kill it. That is the only redeeming thing about this game. That's kind of like the Andy Warhol film where nothing happens for minutes on end. When something does, no matter how trite or boring or stupid it is, you're excited. You cheer. Something finally happened! Drakkhen is just like that.

7) Summoner (PS2). Summoner is a lot like Drakkhen in that you get a party of adventurers, but you can't control them. Unlike Drakkhen, you can switch between which member of the party you control, but you can still only control one of them. (Actually, you might have been able to do this in Drakkhen, I don't remember.) This is called strategy. Otherwise, your party will do all the things you don't want it to do, like cast magic indiscriminately. Or attack a different enemy than you are targetting. I hated the party and wanted to kill the rest of them off every single battle I got into. Furthermore, the story, while intriguing in some ways, started to drag on after awhile. I didn't care about my characters at all. Another thing that ended up sucking (though it does sound good in theory) was that there are tons of sidequests in every town. I mean literally tons, to the point where you can become buried in them. After screwing around doing sidequest after sidequest it's quite easy to forget what it was you were supposed to be doing in the first place. This is where talking to people in town really helps out... oh wait, the towns are so gianormous that it's next to impossible to find the right person to talk to. Not being able to see more than three feet in front of you doesn't help matters either. Buildings will pop right out into view, huge buildings that you ought to be able to see miles away. Nope they are invisible until you are standing almost on top of them. I actually kinda enjoyed this game at first, but after slogging through about thirty hours I was totally bored.

8) Dark Cloud (PS2). I knew from the opening sequence where a Dark Genie is released from an urn and proceeds to eat a priest. And laugh and prance and generally act and look stupid that this game was going to blow chunks. I was so totally not disappointed in that regard either. This is a typical dungeon-crawler only enlivened by the fact that you build up (release) towns as you slog your way through boring dungeon level after boring dungeon level. All this monotony is helped along by the fact that your weapon can break if used too often. And the fact that there is little story to speak of, and none of that story is compelling. This is also yet another hack-and-slash-style action/rpg with randomly generated dungeons that randomly diminish the fun. Whee! I enjoyed the game up to a point, but after awhile, it was nothing but a boring chore. Never got to kick that demented genie's ass, sadly.

9) Final Fantasy Legend (Gameboy). The title of this atrocious piece of manure is a big fat fake lie. Squaresoft knew that I, and many others, had vowed to never play another Saga game after the horribleness of Saga Frontier. "How can we foist a crappy Saga game on an unsuspecting public?" they asked themselves. Call it Final Fantasy, that's how! So okay Saga Frontier was released AFTER this game, but still, what a dirty trick. This is just another in the Saga series, only renamed. And boy does it suck monkey nuts! It's ten billion times worse than Saga Frontier, definitely. You don't get to choose from tons of different storylines, there's only one crappy story to play through here. You do get to pick your party to some degree, from amongst humans, monsters and mutants. Also, you can transform key items before you've used them properly, so you can be stuck in the game forever with no way to advance the story. What fun! There's also no real story to speak of. You're supposed to climb this tower for some reason. There are different worlds. Blah blah blah. Yawn!

10) Final Fantasy Mystic Quest (SNES). HAHAHAHAHA!!! We didn't get FF 2, 3 or 5, so to make it up to us, Squaresoft gave us THIS! Thank you so much, Square. Just what I always wanted. A childish super-easy stupor-inducing story and gameplay crap of a game. My turds are more fun to play with than this game! Granted, being able to visibly see enemies wandering around looking for a fight is always a nice addition, and the fact that enemies show when they have been badly weakened in a battle was a nice touch, but everything else in this game should have been scraped. If I were five I'd consider this game to be an insult to my intelligence. Thank you for this vomitous pile, Square. I'm so stupid I actually found this game mildly challenging and entertaining. (Another game on this list that I beat, but only because it's short and pathetically easy.)