Nutmeg I don't know if you play JRPGs a lot, but what is your opinion on these games? Position in Codex top list in parenthesis.
Chrono Trigger (#51)
Xenogears (#12)
Final Fantasy VII (unranked)
Legend of Mana (unranked)
Vagrant Story (#36)
Kings Field (unranked)
Llylgamyn Saga (unranked)
Final Fantasy Tactics (#28)
Tactics Ogre (#41)
Chrono Cross (unranked)
Llylgamyn Saga and New Age of Llylgamyn are the best ways to play the first 5 Wizardries, if that is something you are interested in.
King's Field is loved by people who value atmosphere and dungeoneering, but it's very slow. Why not just play a FPS with dungeon like levels instead (Unreal, Doom, Dark Forces, PowerSlave or Quake)?
Vagrant Story's combat system is very broken and exploitable. Perhaps if you avoid doing that it's better?
Chrono Trigger is extremely well paced and tells a charming bajka. You can see enemies and play avoid-the-enemy, which is nice, because you will quickly over level and the already stereotypically easy JRPG (of this type) combat will be even easier. Anyway, if you're not charmed by the presentation, art, characters, tour through time and other non-game related things, there's not much here.
Final Fantasy 7 is very similar to CT as a game except it failed to charm me one bit so I hated my time with it. Garbage game. That said it is notable for being the ultimate evolution of Square's blobber menu customization system, previously class based, now "materia" based.
Xenogears and Chrono Cross likewise failed to hook me at all and again there's very little there to combat encounters or dungeon navigation.
Tactics Ogre and Final Fantasy Tactics are (again) extremely broken and exploitable. If you don't play to win but rather to mess around with party builds, they may be enjoyable. I wouldn't know, I played to win and it was very boring. A lot of people enjoy the characters and story in both, but with SRPGs I just skip that stuff. Perhaps I'll return to them with my game director and manga reader hats on to squeeze something out of them.
I have never played Legend of Mana, but its prequels are not very good at all as action games, and the numbers going up only makes thinks more awkward. The third game has beautiful "pixel art" (well it appeals to me, anyway) and I would have played it more just for that but a certain core system is completely bugged and knowing and accounting for that is extremely frustrating. There's a hack to fix it but that just makes things worse somehow as the game seems to have been playtested and balanced bugged.
I wouldn't personally recommend any of those games, except maybe Llylgamyn Saga, KF and CT but only if I knew something about you that might suggest you would enjoy them, and I need to spend some time with KF myself first.
