THE GREATEST GAME OF ALL TIME — THREAD

For me, it's Unlimited SaGa. Unlimited SaGa is an RPG that borrows from the real-life pen and paper RPGs (it has skills like lock-pick, swim, and eavesdrop), yet synchronously eschews its most fundamental concepts for more avant-garde equivalents. It's about navigating dungeons and field areas section by section, the way a DM might say "The twisting passages of the cavern open into a large moonlit hollow, a shimmering painting covers the cave wall and some adventurers' belongings seemed to be scattered about nearby".
In a typical RPG, you would physically move your characters around the screen, through corridors and passageways, open up into a room, and wind up running around, pressing a button to examine or interact with things. Unlimited just does away with that as it's superfluous, a waste of time: You already have to be using your imagination when you play an RPG to figure that your party is walking about with you bantering or scouting out the area, or that your avatar is doing anything other than running around like an autistic robot rubbing his hands over everything in the room.
Unlimited merely provides you with what your characters look like, what the room looks like, some additional excellent artwork, music, ambient sounds, and sound effects to fill the gaps. As a result, it proceeds quickly and efficiently. You use skills or magic to search for treasure and monsters, you find magical dungeon gimmicks and switches and illusions, figure out how to deal with them; you pick your battles with enemies, prepare your equipment and rotate your character line up. People who don't like Unlimited don't understand how to play it or can't deal with something which doesn't provision enough distraction to hold their vibrating chaotic mind with all its ADHD and lack of imagination or invariably edges dopamine bursts in form of easily attainable digital head pats.

Attached: Unlimited SaGa Triple Zero Combo.webm (600x450, 2.58M)

it's called CHESS, pleb

i like Final Fantasy 7, the best jrpg ever made

This is also why so few "people" recognize its supremacy over other SaGa games, if not all RPGs in general. You may contend, that comboing was better within the old format based on pseudo battling chains, yet Unlimited's arcane combo system has its own profundity by putting the spotlight on turn management.
Enemy map behavior is wholly turn-based, with new mechanics like shielding, enemy chains, which the other RPGs have reused ever since.
It further invented Enemy Ecology, which was later reused in MS less significantly, and copied by the vast amounts of RPGs like FFXIII: LR, though much later.
Equipment and forging are the most thorough and orphic in the RPG genre, with equipment being fully adjustable and progression being broadly defined by it. Much more depth than a stat-stick of other RPGs, withal the systems it inspired, e.g. Breath of the Wild's cooking system. Much like how certain ingredients add bonuses to foods in BOTW, forging lets you change passive bonuses, but also the item's entire moveset, which themselves are worth an entire book due to their complexity; to give you an idea of it, let's look at Martial Arts: Unlimited has the best Martial Art mechanics out of any RPG since you get entirely new martial arts based on your character's weight, which plays into equipment unfathomably well and adds layers to character-building.
The panel system further permits substantially more in-depth functionality to character growth. Not to mention, character history operates by registering ALL your actions, including how you move around, which doesn't exist in any other RPGs, and adds ungodly roleplaying depth by adding more roles like explorers with panel and thus stat, proficiency, and skill acquisition being defined by it. And there even are negative, permanent panels that may plague the player at first but can be built to yield the best stat increases in the game.

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It is about as close to true role-playing any VRPG has gotten with everything working through a pure layer of mathematical abstraction with no means for the player to avoid interacting with the world through said abstraction.
It further has the most in-depth exploration mechanics of all time, with huge maps to explore, secrets hidden around every corner that often require layers of logic and planning to find, same thing goes for many puzzles. Not to mention dungeons having a turn limit which gauge battle turns too.
This is all without mentioning its excellent writing and world-building: The minimalist plot slowly reveals itself while slowly uncovering character backgrounds ludologically through various MCs whose relevance opens up new areas to explore while dealing with the cast's personal aspects through dungeon design and other gameplay clues. Plus, the unique dungeons for each main cast member, which are reused to great success in the following games so far (for instance, the Twin-Moon Temple).
Unlimited has proper thieving skills, along with all the field skills that matter when it comes to your character's build, unlike MS, where they're options you burn your jewels on with no influence on characters' (subsequent) performance.
Unlimited was the last game to have proper channeling for spells and field manipulation, all the other games ever since didn't have this mechanic, which is why spell casting is worse off compared to it.
All the mechanics Unlimited expands on are better than in previous RPGs and it's pretty much the only game that did this while doing it well.
Its LP standard as the only way of damaging things added profundity to the expected HP standard — by making it an MP-like resource also absorbing damage.

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Moar liek Unlimited SoGay

The more HP you have, the less chance you have of taking LP damage. The same is true of bosses, so you would do a lot of HP damage first, then switch to LP-damaging attacks —, simultaneously completely reworking traditional resource management into something more functional and balanced which also prevents spam.
Its navigation is complex and allows for a variety of interactive encounters with your environment, which ties to how you build your characters and how they grow too. On top of this, the reel system doesn't hard lock you out of content like the masteries in Romancing SaGa: Minstrel Song since, unlike those, there's no minimum level required to perform field actions, the reel will adjust to it by having more fail states, but not entirely gate you. And avoiding said fail states is not a mere matter of timing without any strategy: The non-battle reels have a 50% chance of stopping in place and a 10% chance of slipping 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5 slots, thus having the player time according to the median outcome and manage risks.
Relating to the reel, its combo system is several separate layers deep, each having its own unique counterplay that simply doesn't exist in another game, again, adding roles to the mix of more mature turn-based gameplay
In other RPGs you can spam out your target-all arts to kill every encounter instantly without thinking of anything else Unlimited requires you to plan ahead and be tactical with your spell casting Especially since several encounters have over a dozen LP and every item in this game has durability points.
The game's highly experimental combat is faster-paced than MS too and those are but a few examples of why this game is so good on its own merits. The combat is extremely layered with turn distribution among a huge roster of characters you cycle through constantly as there is standby healing which in itself is integral due to all arts, even spells, using HP as has been said.

Attached: Unlimited.png (1440x1080, 2.05M)

Not to mention, the order you distribute the turns in determines the character's/-s' momentary formation and thus aggro rates. Correctly rotating defenders is vital to beat bosses.
The reel itself reflects character proficiency in skill in a superior, more profound way than the standard proficiency system, with martials' skills exemplarily not being about damaging things, instead, you're focusing on debuffing by targeting the middleweight line of techniques. It also tosses a bone to those people who bitch and moan about RPGs taking "no skill" because much like in reality, developing skills is hard work that requires patience, not to mention that the reel system alone is memory management that doesn't even exist in older games.
And this is ignoring the aforementioned unique Go!-and-Hold!-combo-system you have on top of reels: If you get a reel chain your resulting combo will be much more damaging than multiple single attacks but enemies can do the same thing and even chain into your chains, resulting in cross combos where both sides of the fight reap the respective benefits, and you don't want that to happen because you'll incur severe LP damage, which depletes a finite resource, with the player consequently permanently dying, and also ends up affecting other things like character growth.
So not only do you have to time your reels correctly depending on what you'll want your characters to do, but you'll also have to consider whether you can effectively pull chains and when it would be safe to do so, which forces you to pay attention to enemy patterns and make educated guesses on their speed factors and how many times they might act in a round, elevating it far above the usual dice rolling as well as timing minigames.

Attached: Unlimited SaGa 2.webm (900x674, 2.78M)

seems like it doesn't have an English release though, so it can suck my ding dong.

dumbass, it does.