robio said:
I think that's a completely legitimate opinion if you only play the first one, and particularly only part of it. The first half of Kingdom Hearts is a very uneven experience. Very much like the developers were still trying to figure out what to do with the game. Particularly in Wonderland, Tarzan's Jungle and parts of Agrabah, it really feels like you're just wandering around trying to trigger events to make the plot move forward. The second half of the game is a much smoother experience.
if you ever wanted to give it a second try though, I would probably suggest just skip the first and go straight into Kingdom Hearts 2.5. As I said before it is the better game for a number of reasons. It just didn't have the same impact as the original.
Yeah, I hated Wonderland; and Alice is one of the best source materials Disney has managed to get its hands on. 
I think I actually gave up in that stupid jungle lol. If I still have the save maybe I'll try continuing from there, if the rest of the game gets better.
#42. Super Mario Galaxy
Black Friday 2007 I was finally going to get the item that eluded me for the past year... a Wii. I made it to Gamestop around 6 AM, and got behind the half dozen hearty souls who managed to get up even earlier. An hour later they opened and it was mine. And besides Wii Sports I needed something to play so naturally I chose....Rayman Raving Rabbids. A couple hours later I realized I had made a great mistake, and around noon I went back and traded it in and picked up the game I should have gotten in the first place, Super Mario Galaxy. I spent the rest of the weekend devoting as much time to the game as I could squeeze in, and would even wake up a half hour early for the next few weeks every day before the rest of the household woke up so I could get just a few more stars under my belt.
After the Dreamcast was released games that really awed me were few and far between, but Galaxy was definitely one of them. It's one of those games I was I could experience again for the first time. So many things made me pause and go "wow." The way that all the characters and objects seemed to have a shiny glow about them always amazed me, particularly the stars. That score... that was amazing. You could have put that soundtrack for Galaxy onto Carnival Games, and it would have made it feel like an epic experience. And the story about Rosalina's origin... that was the perfect amount of story for a Mario game. Nothing too distracting, but finding out a little more was always extra incentive to keep collecting more stars. And the levels themselves were masterpieces. The Good Egg Galaxy in particular was full of awesome stuff. While I said it before, I'll say it again...I really wish i could experience this game again for the first time.
Foolz said:Yeah, I hated Wonderland; and Alice is one of the best source materials Disney has managed to get its hands on.
I think I actually gave up in that stupid jungle lol. If I still have the save maybe I'll try continuing from there, if the rest of the game gets better.
Yeah those two levels are without question the worst in the game. And the Alladin/Agrabah level is also a little rough at first, though it straightens itself out quickly. And Wonderland is a better experience if you chose to revisit it later in the game when you're able to just explore it and not have to deal with the stupid tricks to advance the plot.
I cannot stress enough how much I love Super Mario Galaxy. It’s easily in my top five. It was quite an achievement at the time when I started thinking the 3D platforming well had run dry. I was on a major mission to find that game before it’s street date, visiting several flea markets (Hey, it worked for Vader) but no such luck.
travo said:I cannot stress enough how much I love Super Mario Galaxy. It’s easily in my top five. It was quite an achievement at the time when I started thinking the 3D platforming well had run dry. I was on a major mission to find that game before it’s street date, visiting several flea markets (Hey, it worked for Vader) but no such luck.
Well, it had run dry because nobody was making them anymore. 
Platformers and JRPG'S just weren't cool back in 2007.
Galaxy was great but I remember not being able to stay hooked on it...I'd pick it up and put it down. It felt very arcadey to me with the short levels and objectives. I definitely prefer the Sunshine/Odyssey style for 3D Mario. Although, 3D World might be my favorite one.
Yeah the Galaxy games were really amazing, totally loved them. I would most definitely buy them again if Nintendo ever made them for the Switch.
edgecrusher said:Well, it had run dry because nobody was making them anymore.
Very true point.
edgecrusher said:Galaxy was great but I remember not being able to stay hooked on it...I'd pick it up and put it down. It felt very arcadey to me with the short levels and objectives. I definitely prefer the Sunshine/Odyssey style for 3D Mario. Although, 3D World might be my favorite one.
3D world didn't click with me, although I suspect this might have been because I played through it co-op with my wife. Perhaps I would think differently of it if I had been able to tackle it on my own, at my own speed.
The only game I'll accept as potentially being better than Little King's Story from last gen. 
#41. ActRaiser
There is no way this game should have worked. It was an action/city-sim hybrid and an early title for the SNES, and yet the completely bizarre mash-up felt like it was a polished well-established idea. And who would have thought the city builiding portions would actually be the better part of the game? Clearing land with lightning, dry swamps with the sun, and fending off demons while the good townsfolk built their homes and shrines you....GOD!!! And when the demons got too rough, you transititioned to the the 2-D action segments to smack the bad guys around with your sword. It was glorious. Of course when you finally killed the demon lord and there weren't problems, the townspeople would just forget about you, but humans gonna be humans.
Unlike a lot of games on this list I don't really have a great singular memory of this game that sticks out. It's just a game I keep coming back to every few years. It's such a good game, and even to this day it's such an original idea that no one has tried to duplicate. Each time I play it, it is still fun and feels like a fresh brand new experience. Whenever someone asks for a SNES recommendation, this is usually the first non-Nintendo title recommend without even asking what kind of games they like.
Oh man. I remember having quite a bit of fun playing Actraiser back in the day. It was indeed an odd mashup of gameplay but damn did it ever come together nicely.
#40. Pokemon Crystal
Choosing between Pokemon generation 1 and 2 was a tough call, but I had great times with both of them and there's no question that Crystal was pretty much the pinnacle of old school Pokemon. The funny thing is I almost didn't play it. The first time I played it I spent a few hours with it, but I just wasn't in the frame of mind to be playing Pokemon. I wasn't ready to spend dozens of hours singularly focused on catching them all. So I popped it back into its box, and put it back on my game shelf....for about four years. In that time Ruby and Sapphire had come and gone, and I never gave them a thought. But something made me finally give it a shot, and god I'm glad I did. It was just like the original, but on steroids. It eventually became my lunch hour game. I would sit there with an old horizontal GBA in a back corner of my company's break room trying to catch a few more Pokemon, while an asshole coworker would snicker and tell me about the new Nintendo DS he just got (yeah I really was behind the times when started playing it). Oh well fuck him. The DS literally had nothing but shit on it for the first year, so congrats on getting to play Mario 64 without and analog stick you douche....I digress.
Anyway, yes, Pokemon Crystal was the original on steroids. There were 100 additional Pokemon, bringing the total up to 251! Who could possibly catch that many? There was a day/night cycle that was actually in-synch with real world time. And the most amazing thing was the post-game content. You got to go back to the original land, Kanto, and fight all the original trainers. And if you kept at it, eventually you could challenge the man himself, Ash. It was one of the most mind blowing moments in gaming at the time, and really still is to this day. So sure I was late to the party, but it was an amazing fucking party and it was still going on and I'm glad I checked it out.
From now on I will just think "you think X is better than Mario Galaxy?!"
Dvader said:From now on I will just think "you think X is better than Mario Galaxy?!"
Galaxy was pretty much a Triumph on every level, but it was never the kind of game I can lose an entire day to. I loved it, but I can only play so much of it at a given time. Not really uncommon with action games and me.
Actraiser was amazing. One of the best games from that era easily.
#39. Persona 5
Okay I'm breaking one of my own rules by putting Person 5 on this list. Whenever I do one of these lists I make sure that its been at least a year since I've played the game so I can properly reflect on the quality of the game to make sure I don't rank it too high. When I made this list I was only about 6 or 7 months since my playthrough of the game, but the way I look at it is this is ultimately this game is going to ranked a lot higher than 39. I loved this game. Every complaint I had about Persona 3 and 4 was addressed in this game and nothing was compromised along the way. Better combat. Better laid out dungeons (and they still found a way to keep the randomly generated dungeons). More interesting city centers to explore. Just more of everything. And the art style... holy crap. This game is pretty much on its own level when it comes to that. I could gush over every aspect of this game, but I will spare you. I'll just say that if I played this game 20 years ago, I probably would have ended up writing fan fic about it.
Persona 5, let's say I'm half way there. Whether it would make my top 100 is livin' on a prayer.
Will the rule be broken again for the new Dragon Quest?
#38. NiGHTS into Dreams
It's not often that I'm immediately sold on a game just by the box art, but the second I saw NiGHTS into Dreams I wanted it. That would prove difficult because nothing else about the Sega Saturn appealed to me. All the good games seemed to be stuck in Japan and the system was too expensive for a broke-ass college kid to get one. Still, everytime I was renting a game at Blockbuster or at a game store I'd inevitably see NiGHTS and drool. So many years later, after the Dreamcast had come and gone, I found a bundle on eBay for a Saturn and 6 games including NiGHTS for a mere $30 (because the guy listing it spelled it as Satern). And NiGHTS turned out to be everything I hoped it would be.
NiGHTS had the sense of whimsy that so many early Sega and Nintendo had and seemed to be dropped by every developer in favor of realism. Bright, colorful, and complete fantasy. You got to fly in a world a dreams, and was trippy as hell. Truth be told, to this day I more or less suck at the game. If I practice enough, I can usually get a B score, but it's rare I do better than that. That doesn't matter though. I'm content to just fly around listen to the music and take in the sights (at least until the timer expires).