This Old Neon Forum

Welcome to the #BGE2020 Elimination Round of 512!

Each game is seeded based on its performance in the two opening rounds of pools. Every game in the Upper Bracket has defeated multiple other games in 1-on-1 polls to get to this point. These are still the best of the best.

Polls are updated weekly, typically on Sunday or Monday. Check back throughout the week to make sure you don't miss a vote!

HOW TO VOTE

This is easy. You only get one vote per poll. The game with the most votes wins. In the event of a tie, the higher seed advances, so don't get complacent!

Ritual of the Night is a perfectly competent Symphony of the Night clone (fair play to Iga). Final Fantasy IV is one of the earliest plot-driven JRPGs to gain popularity in the west. It's also the first entry in the series that kind of unshackled Square from their sheer mechanics (e.g. the job system) and allow them to be abstracted into tropes that they could layer on top of more naturalistically-designed scenarios.

For example, the traditional jobs are all represented, but the point of your journey isn't to grind up Cecil's "Knight" levels or to construct a balanced party of physical, magical, and healing units. Instead, you get to enjoy the story and characters while still doing "class" stuff in bespoke scenarios. It's a good variation. But the point is that it's an early variation, and it kind of paved the way for Square to keep making each successive entry in the series differenter and differenter.