First off, as of Feb 3 it’s been 8 years since I started superfamicomrpgs on blogspot, which is hard to believe. Anyway:

1998 had a lot of games; 1999 has more but from what I can see, the number of SRPGs (especially the ones I will actually be playing) starts to decline. As I said in my 1999 preview post, every game I played for 1998 was either Playstation or Saturn (with the exception of the remake of Black Matrix for the Dreamcast, but that wasn’t actually a 1998 game).

1998 saw the effective end of four SRPG series: Langrisser, Shining Force, Eiketsuden (the Koei series), and Farland (Eiketsuden and Farland both have additional entries on computers that weren’t ported to console).

Choosing a game of the year is difficult. I only gave an A rating to five games (more on the rating system in the next part): Tokyo Majin Gakuen, Epica Stella, Wachenroder, Houshin Engi, and Guardian Recall. I know a lot of people would probably want to see Shining Force III as GotY but I just didn’t enjoy it as much as a lot of other people seemed to.

Usually I try to make my GotY a mix of personal enjoyment, significance/reception, etc, but that’s hard to do here. Looking at those five my immediate reaction is that it should be Tokyo Majin Gakuen or Houshin Engi.

So based on that reaction I went back and read the posts I wrote for both games, and I think I am going to pick Houshin Engi. I liked the ability/skill system and the feature of calling in reinforcements if your initial characters die. There aren’t really any interface issues to speak of and the story is functional. So here’s my GotY list:

• 1990: Fire Emblem
• 1991: Langrisser
• 1992: Just Breed
• 1993: Super Robot Taisen 3 
• 1994: Langrisser II
• 1995: Riglord Saga
• 1996: Energy Breaker
• 1997: Final Fantasy Tactics
• 1998: Houshin Engi

Rating system

When I started the SRPG plays, I didn’t want to try to do a rating system that depended on objectively rating the games. Instead, I just did a simple A-B-C system that was purely based on my feeling after finishing the game. The ratings I have assigned to each game do accurately reflect that feeling*, but I’ve come to think that they don’t really do much to qualify which games are good and which are bad, even by my own opinions.

(*the exception is my decision to automatically give a C rating to a game that I give up playing because I get stuck. I’m not sure this was fair to a few games, especially Langrisser IV.)

A big issue with the rating system has really come to the forefront in the 1997-1998 games. Saturn games have a much harder time getting a B or A than Playstation games because the emulator speedup works much better on Duckstation than it does on Mednafen, meaning that the Saturn games are much more likely to try my patience with slow/sluggish play. The ratings can also be influenced by factors that have nothing to do with the game itself, like illness or anticipation of the next game on the list.

So I think I’m going to give numeric ratings a try, while still doing the letter ratings alongside them. I haven’t fully decided on the rating yet, but I do know that I am only going to factor into the rating things that have a significant impact on my enjoyment of the game (so excluding things like graphics and music). We’ll see how it works.

Games to play

I’m going to go back to switching between SRPGs and other games; I had started to do this but I really wanted to get past 1998 so I really focused heavily on the SRPGs while just doing an occasional quick play of an old Famicom RPG if I needed a break.