Final Fantasy-less title: Phantasy Star II
Totally Square-free developer: Sega AM7 (aka Overworks)
Why you should ignore Cecil and play this: Final Fantasy IV is often credited as one of the first, if not the first RPG to really hook players into the story via well-developed characters. While there is no limit toour love for FFIV, Phantasy Star II had us glued to the TV a full year before Cecil, Kain and Rosa graced us with their presence.
When the NES was barely stringing narratives together, this Sega-powered sequel weaved an intricate tale concerning an entire solar system. Your party was made up of realized characters, each with motivations and inhibitions that played out as the story carried on. These features are commonplace today, but at the time, well, it was astounding. Nothing else really like it. We'd talk more about the plot, but there are serious spoilers and huge twists to consider, and we wouldn't want to diminish their impact in any way.
It's not the most user friendly game, however. The battles are extremely hard (plus kind of difficult to follow) and spells have weird, made up names, usually forcing you to cast them just to see what they do. But, the positives outweigh the irksome issues. Grab this in a compilation or track down a Genesis if you must, but any RPG fan who dismisses this is essentially shrugging off the basis of every traditional RPG released since.
