why is okage one of your favourites
it was charming and cute and the designs were pretty badass but the gameplay was such balls
as far as my faves
Live A Live
had a badass soundtrack, among other things. early work of Yoko Shimomura, who's better known for composing for games like Super Mario RPG and the Kingdom Hearts series. it also does some cool experimental things with narrative and gameplay. the chapters are all seemingly unrelated, and can be played separately in any order, and most of them offer some neat new mechanic. the Caveman chapter introduces item synthesis, the Cowboy chapter is based largely around setting up traps in preparation for the boss fight, the Near Future chapter lets you read minds, and the Sci-Fi chapter is mostly devoid of battles (it's one of the rare situations where I've seen a 2d game create an effectively tense atmosphere.) the plot itself is nothing special, but it does a lot of neat things that are worth noting
the Baten Kaitoses
yeah, okay, the voice acting is really bad in these ones. still, though, they were pretty amazing games. the soundtracks were consistently solid, the environments were pretty (although with them being pre-rendered, you'd sort of expect that), and the gameplay was interesting. the whole Magnus thing had its snags in the first, but they really streamlined it in the second. good games, basically.
Super Mario RPG
a platforming RPG? awesome. its spiritual successors the Paper Mario and M+L series kept the same basic idea, but they're their own things, and Paper Mario's already been mentioned. SMRPG was at the time an exercise in an unheard-of premise; adding gameplay to turnbased jRPGs. and it worked! Yoko Shimomura credits this game as one of the major landmarks in her career, and it's definitely an awesome soundtrack.
the Mother series
GEE WHO WOULDA THUNK IT
yeah, they're pretty solid. Mother was, for the most part, super grindtastic and sort of grueling, and was really just Dragon Quest with different graphics. still, it had some pretty great moments. Earthbound really ramped it up from there; it didn't do much to innovate RPG gameplay, but had one of the smoothest systems of the time, and was filled with charming little details. the soundtrack is also worth noting; Tanaka and Suzuki saw the SNES' sound capabilities, and basically went all out. the soundtrack's style is really all over the place, from more regular pieces to stranger, more experimental songs. was apparently the first game to make such use of string vibrato. then there's Mother 3, which focused more on the plot side of things than its predecessors, and did a pretty good job of it, too. the soundtrack and general style are more in line with what you'd expect from an RPG, but they still do it really well.
