Fable 2 largely was just as good as one with one added bonus… for me at least.
The cutscenes were all done in engine, with all the same rules that the game has.
So running into the final boss fight, I had run out of healing items, so I ate ALL my food and drank ALL my beer and wine before starting the final fight.
Cut scene starts. Villain starts his villiain monologue as villains do. My character proceeds to puke all over his shoes.
The story and engagement. Ultima IV let you talk to literally every NPC in the game, everyone had a name and a job and something to say.
Phantasy Star II was essentially ripped off for Final Fantasy VII to the point where from the minute they introduced Aerith I was like “Well, shit, better not give HER anything I want to keep, she’s dead 1/2 way through the game.” (That was Nei in PSII).
To be clear, those are just the first two off the top of my head, there were other excellent, excellent RPGs.
I really liked the gold box D&D games from SSI - Pool of Radiance, Curse of the Azure Bonds, Secret of the Silver Blades. They don’t hold up well now due to all being turn based RPGs. There is a Steam Collection of ALL of that.
Speaking of, before Fallout, there was Wasteland which has had a modern reboot and sequel. Also a great game that had copy protection built into a story book full of backstory paragraphs.
For JRPGs, it’s hard to go wrong with Suikoden 1 and 2, recently re-released on PS5, drop dead gorgeous RPGs. The Golden Sun games were great too.
I’ve played probably hundreds of RPGs since the start. Disco Elysium isn’t even top 10. It LOOKS great, the writing is dogshit.
I don’t get the love for this game. I’ve been playing CRPGs since Temple of Apshai and I’ve never seen a game where the story and dialog choices appear to have been written by or for people with traumatic brain injury.
So bad that I had to hop on a forum and go “Hey, so, there aren’t any good choices in the dialog tree, did I fuck up my character generation? Should I start over?”
And got “You just don’t get it, man!”
Yeah, I don’t get games where “You want some fuck?” is a valid dialog choice.