Zing wrote:If you are not into RPGs, then why would you play either?
To expand your horizons. When you learn to appreciate something that you didn't before, that makes your life more interesting, and it makes you a more interesting person. If you limit yourself to a list of things that you like, you're not really living life.
I am not into baseball. Just because a particular baseball game might be the "best of all time", why would I play it?
I'm no fan of baseball either. Or any sport. MLB Baseball on the Intellivision is still one of the best 2 player games of all time though. You don't have to care about baseball to enjoy a baseball video game any more than you have to care about D&D to enjoy a cRPG.
We are prepared to live in the plain and die in the plain!
Secret of Mana is great and I'd definitely recommend it over CT. If you want to play a great SNES RPG, tho, I'd suggest Breath of Fire 2 instead (did you say you already played FF6 and Super Mario RPG? Then yeah, BOF2). But this is just my opinion b/c... I really hate CT. Here's why:
1) The lack of random battles. Unlike a lot of other RPGs that don't have random battles (like Earthbound), the enemy encounters are unavoidable for the most part. They're just always in the same place on the overworld and feature the same enemies. Each. And. Every. Time. Not sure why people consider this BETTER than random encounters (or non-random encounters done right, like in Earthbound or Chrono Cross), but yeesh. It gets old pretty quickly.
2) The storyline has this feeling like it was written on the fly, as the programmers made the game. I'm positive it wasn't, but a couple of rewrites might have improved the script a bit. I think once they were done writing it, there were things that should have been taken out or changed, but b/c so much time or effort had gone into it, those things just weren't. Large portions of the game seem to have little or no relation to the rest of the game, like the nuns in the beginning. Is there a point or is this just a dungeon plopped there in order to have a dungeon? What's worse about that in particular is how telegraphed the whole thing is with sub-Working Designs humor spelling out the truth of the church/monastery/whatever it is.
3) The game is really short, but actually has quite a bit of padding in places, and an awful lot of "optional" sidequests that are almost totally necessary to have any hope of defeating the end boss.
4) A weird threat that never feels very threatening. I guess by his... its... very nature you aren't going to get taunted and laughed at around every corner the way you do by, say, Kefka, but it made it tough to really give a damn about stopping him... it.
The game is also full of a lot of little annoyances that add up after awhile. The search for Frog's home, for instance. It's hidden, and you can only really find it if you fight the enemy in that one spot and then sit and wait until the bush shakes. Or if you already know its there, and now you do. If you end up playing CT, you can thank me when you get to that part. Another annoyance: walking up that snowy mountain and having to hide behind trees. This would work so well if the game actually let you do that. Yeah, there's a trick to it, but man was it frustrating figuring out the trick, instead of just sliding around the tree as you push against it.
I can't rightly say that CT is a bad game, but I just didn't enjoy it nearly as much as everyone else seems to have. I like Lucca and Ayla and that's about it.
