One undeniable fact of the universe is that the best man doesn't always win. For every two-bit hack getting paid to write articles online even though they're wrong about everything and can't go three sentences without a typo, there's someone like me who has impeccable grammar, is always right, and also gets paid nothing and has maybe 5 regular readers of my blog.
Just the same, for every
Final Fantasy, every
Mario, and every other franchise that everyone knows and that everyone will always instantly buy the next game in the series even if the last one was trash, there's a dozen other games that were just as good, if not even better, but that never made it anywhere, for whatever reason. Here are my personal top five examples that the world isn't fair.
5. Warlords Battlecry
Warlords Battlecry was a spinoff from the
Warlords series of turn-based fantasy games, changing the genre from turn-based strategy to real-time strategy. One thing you'll notice is a lot of the games on this list are very similar to other, far more popular game series. In this case, the other series is, of course,
Warcraft.
Warcraft actually came first. (Compared to
Battlecry at least,
Warlords beat the first
Warcraft by four years.) However,
Warlords Battlecry was far better. It had more factions, BETTER factions, and introduced the idea of a persistent hero leveling system in an RTS two years before
Warcraft tried to play it up as new and innovative.
Of course,
Warcraft had Blizzard money behind it, and that's all there is to it. On a more fair note,
Warcraft 3 was also far more moddable compared to
Battlecry, so it does have that going for it.
4. Legend of Dragoon
Developed by Sony Computer Entertainment back before they sucked (as bad as they do now)
Legend of Dragoon was one of the best RPGs released for the original Playstation. The game revolved entirely around the main characters' ability to transform into the titular Dragoons, magical super-soldiers with the power of dragons.
The other major draw of the game was the precision combat system. Whenever you attacked an enemy, two symbols would appear on the screen and move toward one another. If you pressed a button when the symbols met, you could execute combination attacks. I have lousy timing so it was never very good for me, but whatever. It was a good system that has been re-used a lot of times in various RPGs over the years. Remember this system, because it will become important in a bit.
Despite receiving universally high scores from independent critics and becoming a cult classic, every major review site of the day BLASTED the game, giving it scores of around 3 or 4 out of 10, which any gamer knows is something that almost never happens. Most of the reviews were clearly written about the first chapter of the game. Every single one of them revolved around the precision combat system, which they claimed was "exactly the same as
Final Fantasy's Limit Break system", which is a lie so ballsy they might as well have claimed the sky was neon green. The reviews were all such blatant bullshit that sites were petitioned to re-review the game. The few that did just gave it the same review they already had.
I don't want to be a conspiracy theorist and claim that Square-Enix recognized a legitimate and powerful competitor and paid critics to destroy it. All I'm saying is that every name worth buying totally blasted the game, flat-out dismissed its best feature, and name-dropped its primary competitor right there in the review.
So, I guess, I am absolutely saying that Square-Enix paid critics to kill
Legend of Dragoon.
3. Tactics Ogre
How to introduce this series...
Tactics Ogre is what
Final Fantasy Tactics was supposed to be. Yeah, that works. I don't just mean that as some backhanded way of saying that
Ogre is better, either. No, I mean it literally.
Developed by Quest, the series began as
Ogre Battle: March of the Black Queen. That one was... actually pretty terrible. It had some cool ideas, but was bogged down by an extremely complicated system where battles could take hours to finish and you had very little control in combat. The follow-up,
Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together, revamped the entire concept, practically inventing the tactical combat system that any RPG fan will undoubtedly recognize from other games like, just for a wild example, literally everything that Atlus has ever published ever.
Ogre also set up an intriguing story in a consistent world. Landmasses, politics, and characters carried over between games. The storytelling was deep, involved, and dark without being hopeless.
So what went wrong? Square-Enix went wrong. Since publishers Atlus weren't very active in the United States at the time, Quest went with a company called Enix for the western release of
March of the Black Queen. Enix agreed, on the grounds that the game would be a limited release only, and receive no marketing. Years later, another company called Squaresoft pulled the exact same trick with the sequel. That's right, Quest got screwed by both halves of Square-Enix before the companies' merger.
Soon afterward, lead designer Yasumi Matsuno left Quest along with several other senior designers, and eventually went to work for Squaresoft. Quest tried to keep the series going, but it was over. Soon enough Square-Enix bought Quest in its entirety and killed off the series for good. Meanwhile, Yasumi and his team went to work on spiritual successor
Final Fantasy Tactics, later taking the name Ivalice Alliance.
So, why am I complaining? Because,
as I've said before,
Final Fantasy Tactics sucks. Okay, okay, I'll admit that it did some things right, namely adding the mix-and-match customization system that everyone loved. But
Ogre has better storytelling, a more compelling world and characters, and just generally really, really deserves to be its own thing.
There was a remake, made by Square-Enix and Ivalice Alliance, of
Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together for the Playstation Portable, that added new story content, gave you the ability to play through every branch of the story on the same save file, and was just generally the best thing ever. Too bad apparently nobody liked it except for me, and so the odds of us ever getting another
Tactics Ogre are slim to none.
2. The Guardian Legend
Take old school
Legend of Zelda, add in a splash of
1942, make it better than both of them, and top it off with a cool robot girl who can transform into a spaceship. That's the recipe for
The Guardian Legend.
As "The Guardian" ("full name Strongest Warrior System D.P., pet name Miria"... but that's only in the Japanese manual because they hate us) your job is to blow up the alien planet Naju before it collides with Earth and kills everyone. To accomplish this you'll explore a vast overworld, defeating enemies and collecting upgrades and weapons, then travel into the "corridors", where Miria transforms into a spaceship and blasts through waves of enemies in order to activate the artificial planet's self-destruct mechanism.
The game features a robust upgrade system, and a style of gameplay that is both challenging and unique, being basically two games in one. That does mean each half is smaller than its equivalent, but it's still quite big. Try an overworld map even larger than the first
Zelda's, and with roughly 2/3rds as many shooter levels as
1942.
Unfortunately, the reception at the time was almost all negative. Referred to as "mediocre at best" by
Electronic Gaming Monthly, the highest score it ever got from any official publication was just shy of an 8 out of 10. A big part of this can be put on the game's stupidly complicated password system.
The Guardian Legend came out near the end of the "password" era of gaming, when games were getting too complicated for password saves to be viable.
TGL's passwords are all 32 characters long, and include both upper and lower case letters, numbers, and the symbols "?" and "!". Yeah, they're stupid.
Fortunately, emulators and save states exist now, removing the need for those stupid passwords. You can still use the passwords, of course, and ironically they actually make it even better now. Why? Because of "The Lost Frontier". That's the fan nickname for the region outside the playable bounds of the game, which you can reach by inputting certain passwords. The result is
Super Mario Bros'
Minus World, if Minus World was actually cool - an endless series of (admittedly very glitchy) procedurally generated maps to explore.
Honorable Mentions
Number 1 is coming soon, but first few that didn't quite make the cut.
Psi-Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy - A pretty damn good third person shooter from the days before the market was completely saturated with those. Featured a decent amount of polish, an intriguing story, fun gameplay with cool psychic powers, a totally pretentious title, and
a cool song by Cold. Despite being critically acclaimed and being remembered as a cult classic, it had the misfortune of coming out alongside such titans as
Half-Life 2 and
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, and so it disappeared into the sea of other one-shot titles.
Beyond Good and Evil - One of the most criminally underrated games of all time,
Beyond Good and Evil follows the story of Jade, kickass heroine and photojournalist, on her quest to expose the evil DomZ. Envisioned as the first part of a trilogy, the game was considered a commercial failure. It did eventually get an HD remaster, and
Beyond Good and Evil 2 is actually in the works now, disqualifying it for this list, but it's worth mentioning nonetheless.
And now...
1. Vectorman
Developed by BlueSky Software,
Vectorman had everything. It was fun, it looked marvelous, and it had lots of heart. Draws included a cool transformation system, humorous minigame rounds between the gameplay stages, and near-Playstation-quality graphics... on the Sega Genesis! The point is,
Vectorman is the greatest video game ever God damn made, and if you disagree I will cut you.
If any game deserved fame and fortune, it's
Vectorman. This should be one of the great franchises of all time that everyone knows and loves. People should be camping out in front of their local GameStop for a copy of
Vectorman X 12: Warhead's Revenge. But they're not. Chances are, you never even heard the name "Vectorman" before you read this post.
What happened? Sega happened. BlueSky created a plan for
Vectorman 3 for the Sega Saturn, but their relationship with Sega ended before the game could be greenlit. Sega kept the rights to
Vectorman, and refused to let anything be done with them, just for the Hell of it. ...ha, no, that would be BETTER. Actually, Sega had plans to make their own
Vectorman game, with absolutely none of the stuff that made the original so great, and not even in the same genre. (
Speaking of, fans of Guilty Gear should be finding this story extremely familiar right now.)
Sega showed their NEW and IMPROVED
Vectorman at the 2003 E3 to universal disdain, and that was the last anyone ever heard of this franchise. As for BlueSky... some of their people went on to found VBlank Entertainment, and to create
Shakedown Hawaii and
Retro City Rampage DX. So that's cool.
