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this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2025
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Depends on the game. There are no indie games better than the original Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy VI on the SNES.
While Chrono Trigger and FFVI are among my all time favourites, they’re kind of like an prog rock superbands. They’re a pinnacle of the era, impossible to top in their own categories. But if you know where to look there are probably some guys doing stuff as impressive, if not more, out of their garages. Sea of Stars and Chained Echoes come to mind.
I've tried those.
Sea of Stars looks as pretty as Chrono Trigger, but its writing is noticeably worse and it completely fails at one of Chrono Trigger's great strengths, pacing. In Sea of Stars' defense, it is generally better than Chrono Trigger at interesting dungeon design and its battle system has more potential. But those don't compensate enough for poor writing and especially pacing.
Chained Echoes tries really hard to fit a 32-bit plot into a 16-bit running time, and it doesn't quite work. Still, it left me interested in more by the same dev team, especially if trends and tech change so that they can switch to doing a game explicitly inspired by Xenogears and its ilk.
Yea. The JRPG genre has a lot of amazing modern titles. It is just that the genre fell out of popularity for a while and the newer titles never got the major marketing that Chrono Trigger and FF received.
Though, good news, the genre does seem to be heading towards a revival.
Of course. I am a big fan of the original Doom games (Heretic and Hexen included) myself. But still, I feel like these are exceptions, not the rule.
It still depends on the genre and what games you are exposed to. Super Mario Bros 3 is still the best 2D platformer of all time, I am not aware of any indie game even close to the polish of SMB3.
I'd say both DKC2 and Super Mario World easily best Mario Bros 3.
But not that you mention it, there is a lack of indie platformers that are good.
I agree that I can't talk about genres I'm not familiar with, like platformers and action games (which I guess are the best contenders for retro gamers). With that said, even when I played through widely acclaimed as one of the best RPGs - Ultima 4, I still couldn't enjoy it. I'm curious how common this experience with popular retro games.
I think Ultima 4 is over rated. FF6, Secret of Mana, Chrono trigger, and even Earthbound I'd say are better (Earthbound was way ahead of it's time by having weak enemies run away from you in the overworld too).
Kudos for acknowledging it.
I cannot really think of any indie action game that came close to Bayonetta, Ninja Gaiden II, God Hand… etc.
That said, I've seen a lot of people claim Hollow Knight is better than Castlevania: SotN, so it's definitely genre-dependent.