[Ebrey]

The original game was well liked for several reasons:

1) It was released before FF 7, when your only other RPG options were Wild Arms and Vandal Hearts, both of which are competent but unoriginal.
2) The music is fantastic.
3) Recruiting 108 characters was fun, although in the original most of them are combat characters who are useless. How do you use 70 combat characters in a 15 hour game? In later games more of the characters would open up minigames rather than fighting.
4) The battles were nice and fast. There were also wars and duels which were simple but fun.

The story wasn't that great, and was poorly translated, but it's a short game, so why not play it?

The second game builds on the first, but it's 50 hours long and has a fantastic storyline (terribly translated). It has one of the best horribly evil villains AND one of the best sympathetic villains in RPG history, and they complement each other brilliantly. The second also features one of the most robust castles in the series, where you can play minigames and learn characters' backstories by investigatin them.

The third has another great story, helped by a better translation and the fact that you play it from multiple perspectives. It falls apart a little in the end, when the series creator quit because they wouldn't let him do another POV from Bishop Sasarai of Harmonia (Harmonia is the powerful empire in the background of many of the games... like Lodis in the Ogre Battle Saga). However the graphics are incredibly jerky due to a terrible graphics engine, and the gameplay is repetitive. Instead of dungeons, the game's length is padded out by making you move across the same field areas over and over again. The castle in this game doesn't change as much visually as II's did when you recruit more characters, but getting the theater is awesome. It lets you select characters to reenact famous scenes, and they do them in their own unique style.

Four is apparently awful due to a bad story and a high sea encounter rate. I haven't played it.

Five is supposed to be good.

[Ebrey]

[Ebrey]

[Ebrey]

Internisus, you need to play the SNES/Playstation Tactics Ogre. It's like FFT, except it doesn't get whacky at the end. And it's got 3 very different paths you can take. And the translation is slightly less shitty. The gameplay is frustrating at the beginning but becomes more satisfying as you get into it.

[Ebrey]