Your fave 7th Gen games (PS3/360/Wii only)

[ElkinFencer10]

I'm going to catch some flack for this, or a least some surprise, but looking back my favorite Wii game was probably The Conduit.

You'll catch no flak and no surprise from me. The Conduit was an AMAZING Wii exclusive in my opinion, and Conduit 2 was even better IMO. The wave mode with the local co-op was just fantastic. I'm STILL butthurt that we never got a Conduit 3 on Wii, Wii U, or 3DS. Maybe Switch? Probably not, but I can dream.

[fastbilly1]

PS3:
Gran Turismo 5&6 - Playing GT5 multiplayer in a simpit is still the best car sim experience I have had. Sadly the guy I knew that had that setup moved before GT6 dropped.

360:
Halo Reach - This was the best Halo since the first for me. Beat the campaign probably half a dozen times in coop.
Zoids Assault - Sure it is not a great game and it is stupidly difficult. But it is Zoids as a SRPG. When I sold my 360, it is the only game I kept.

Wii:
Wii Sports - I have a Wii hooked up for Wii bowling this weekend
Lets Tap - One of the best drunk party games ever created
Kororinpa 1&2 - Excellent tilt puzzle games
Mario Galaxy - The sequel to Mario 64
Monster Hunter 3 - I spent an undisclosed large amount of time playing this online with friends. I was still terrible at it, but had a ball trying to help others.
Tatsunoko vs Capcom - No other game let me play as Jun and ChunLi. Well I guess Mugen...Still gets played in regular rotation at parties, partially since it is a 4 button fighter.
Disaster: Day of Crisis - The Monolith game to buy. Solid Action Adventure disaster game. I expected it to be nothing but QTEs, but it was a surprising mix of genres.

Multiple Platforms:
Castle Crashers - I rank this in the top 5 beatemups of all time
Battle Block Theater - Easily one of the best coop platformers ever made, though I am a huge fan of the game that it is based off of; PDA Game, or as we call it TV Head game
Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Echoes of Time - This is a Wii/DS title with online crossplatform play. The best ARPG of the generation. Gameplay is fast and simple, but it sucks you in with customization and combos.
Bioshock - If for no other reason, walking around and looking at Rapture.
Portal 2 - Exquisite single player, stellar coop. I am still trying to make a combustible lemon.
Borderlands Series
Left 4 Dead 2 - A perfect coop FPS. I do not say that lightly. I have well over 1000 hours in the game (mostly as Ellis and Zoey) and a couple weeks ago I heard an Ellis quote I had never heard before. Heck I even played this one with DSH a couple times:

xen is a buddy from college that I have gamed with weekly for fifteenish years now, same as Ack.

[strangenova]

360:
Borderlands 1 & 2
Elder Scrolls Oblivion
Star Wars Force Unleashed
Halo 3
Portal
Street Fighter 4
Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3
Gears of War 1-3
Dungeon Defenders


WII:
Legend of Zelda Twilight Princess
Trauma Center Second Opinion
Kirby Return to Dreamland
Donkey Kong Country Returns
Castlevania Adventure Rebirth

No ps3, so no opinion on its games.

[Sarge]

So I've been lazy and not wanted to jump in until I could do this properly... but what the heck, I'll just throw some random stuff up just so I can get on the record!

So, the first "next-gen" system I got was the Wii. If I had to peg my absolute favorites for the system, there'd be a lot of first-party titles. In particular...

Twilight Princess - Basically Super Ocarina of Time, which works for me. I know everyone hates the motion controls that were added, but they didn't bother me much.
The Last Story - The first RPG of any flavor that gave me Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy III/VI vibes in years. Absolutely fantastic.
Xenoblade - Certainly not perfect, but it kept me inspired to play through the 100-hour runtime. Not as good as TLS, but still very, very good.
Mario Galaxy - Singlehandedly reawakened my joy at playing 3D platformers.
Mario Galaxy 2 - More an expansion, but when it's an expansion on SMG, well...
New Super Mario Bros. Wii - Despite not particularly liking the physics, this was one of the absolute best in the 2D series. I liked it more than the Wii U one.
Metroid Prime Trilogy - I'm cheating a little bit here, as only MP3 was native on release, but it was a darn fine game, and getting the other two converted was super-duper awesome.
A Boy and His Blob - If you can believe it, this came out around a time that I questioned whether it was worth picking up a 2D game, because it was going to be too short. Turns out it was plenty long, and worth every bit of the $40 I spent on it.
Super Paper Mario - I loved the humor in this. Well worth playing. Sure, the platforming wasn't as deep as the main series, and the RPG elements weren't as deep as the Paper Mario games before it, but as an amalgam it was super fun.
Metroid: Other M - Yes, I liked it. Shut up.
Zack & Wiki - It got frustrating towards the end, but it had all sorts of creativity and style.
Super Smash Bros. Brawl - I didn't play it as obsessively as Melee, but it's still a darn fine entry that actually had some single-player meat on the bone.
Kirby's Epic Yarn - Only challenging if you're going for the highest medal rankings. Which is totally how you should play it. I also like Return to Dreamland, but that one was a little too short and safe to be amazing.

There are other games that I could mention, but I have to cut it off somewhere. I honestly think that the Wii has a better first-party lineup than the 'cube, and a ton more interesting games that are still very good, or I just haven't gotten to yet.

Oh, right, there's also WiiWare. Gotta mention a few of those.

Castlevania: The Adventure ReBirth - Yep, it's old-school CV, and it's good.
Mega Man 9 - If you haven't played this yet, just know that this is Inti Creates at its best. It's hard as heck, but uniformly fantastic. I seriously believe that the game is up there with Mega Man 2, although it's not nearly as breezy so I don't replay it often. MM10 is merely solid, sadly.

[Xeogred]

Hmm, I played about 5 hours of The Last Story and wasn't very impressed. Have you played The Lost Odyssey, Sarge? It didn't seem near that same caliber at all, but I want to give The Last Story another shot someday.

[ElkinFencer10]

Hmm, I played about 5 hours of The Last Story and wasn't very impressed. Have you played The Lost Odyssey, Sarge? It didn't seem near that same caliber at all, but I want to give The Last Story another shot someday.

The Last Story is probably my #1 favorite Wii game.

[PartridgeSenpai]

Hmm, I played about 5 hours of The Last Story and wasn't very impressed. Have you played The Lost Odyssey, Sarge? It didn't seem near that same caliber at all, but I want to give The Last Story another shot someday.

The Last Story is probably my #1 favorite Wii game.

I just always get bored with TLS whenever I play it. It never captures me. I get past the starting mission, and then I put it down and never come back. Y'all seem to really like it, so I really gotta just force myself to sit down and give it a full day or something sometime.

[alienjesus]

Hmm, I played about 5 hours of The Last Story and wasn't very impressed. Have you played The Lost Odyssey, Sarge? It didn't seem near that same caliber at all, but I want to give The Last Story another shot someday.

The Last Story is probably my #1 favorite Wii game.

I just always get bored with TLS whenever I play it. It never captures me. I get past the starting mission, and then I put it down and never come back. Y'all seem to really like it, so I really gotta just force myself to sit down and give it a full day or something sometime.

I also really like this game. In many ways it does the opposite to Xenoblade, but it's still awesome. Instead of a big spawling 100 hour adventure with endless sidequests and a fairly conventional MMO style battle system, it's a super focused 18 hour linear RPG with a really unique ARPG battle system.

[Exhuminator]

The Last Story was an 8/10 action-RPG for me. I enjoyed the atmosphere and its combat system. But The Last Story has two very big flaws IMO though:

1.) The Last Story often asks too much of the poor Wii's power, and frame rates often drop down into the teens, if not the single digits. I'm not a spectacle addict by any means, and can normally deal with inconsistent frame rates without complaint. But the frame rate drops in The Last Story can be so bad they sometimes affect the actual gameplay, which is unacceptable considering this is an EXCLUSIVE and the developer knew exactly how much power they had to work with.

2.) The Last Story has a couple optional areas/bosses that are very easy to miss, as in, without using a guide you are almost guaranteed to miss them. These miss-able sections represent significant portions of content in an already fairly short game. I think that when you've produced an RPG that is on the short side, further shortening it by making considerably sized content easy to miss is just dumb.

One last caveat; I also did not find The Last Story's plot to be very interesting. It's not terrible or anything, but it's not particularly memorable. If you enjoy romance in your RPGs, you might find the plot to be more interesting than I did though.

All of that said, if you enjoy action-RPGs and own a Wii, definitely give The Last Story a try. The things that bothered me may have no effect on you.

[Sarge]

Hmm, I played about 5 hours of The Last Story and wasn't very impressed. Have you played The Lost Odyssey, Sarge? It didn't seem near that same caliber at all, but I want to give The Last Story another shot someday.

Yeah, and it tended to bore me. I didn't like the battle system, it felt a little too perfunctory. I've wanted to get back to it at some point, though, and give it another shot. I get burned out on JRPGs a lot faster than I used to, probably because I've played too many!

The best way to play The Last Story is to put that combat mode to manual. Auto-attacks might be more powerful, but having control of your dude makes all the difference in the world.

The Last Story was an 8/10 action-RPG for me. I enjoyed the atmosphere and its combat system. But The Last Story has two very big flaws IMO though:

1.) The Last Story often asks too much of the poor Wii's power, and frame rates often drop down into the teens, if not the single digits. I'm not a spectacle addict by any means, and can normally deal with inconsistent frame rates without complaint. But the frame rate drops in The Last Story can be so bad they sometimes affect the actual gameplay, which is unacceptable considering this is an EXCLUSIVE and the developer knew exactly how much power they had to work with.

2.) The Last Story has a couple optional areas/bosses that are very easy to miss, as in, without using a guide you are almost guaranteed to miss them. These miss-able sections represent significant portions of content in an already fairly short game. I think that when you've produced an RPG that is on the short side, further shortening it by making considerably sized content easy to miss is just dumb.

One last caveat; I also did not find The Last Story's plot to be very interesting. It's not terrible or anything, but it's not particularly memorable. If you enjoy romance in your RPGs, you might find the plot to be more interesting than I did though.

All of that said, if you enjoy action-RPGs and own a Wii, definitely give The Last Story a try. The things that bothered me may have no effect on you.

Yeah, the story wasn't blow-the-doors-off, but for some reason it resonated with me a lot more. I was also very careful about not missing any of the content, as I'd been warned about how easy it is to skip stuff. For me, it was a perfectly-paced, linear action-RPG, and those are worth their weight in gold to me.

Honestly, all the issues you describe are definitely there. I acknowledge them, but it still didn't bring the game down in my estimation.

Also, I don't know how I skipped Skyward Sword. I loved that game, and would have been more than content with another just like it on Wii U/Switch.