dtgreene: Personally, I found the real-time-with-pause combat to be extremely poor, and that keeps these games from being near the top. BG1 also inherits the problems with low-leved AD&D, while BG2 has your companions constantly interrupting you when you're trying to do something and giving a whole bunch of timed quests at once. Those keep the games from coming even close to the position of "Best", and those things have actually kept me from enjoying either game enough to finish it.
awalterj: Never had any problems with the battle system in BG. The system can't be extremely poor because I'm not a genius, just an average player with above average motivation.
I found the game overall to be very user-friendly and easy to get into. Compared to most older CRPGs I had played, it definitely was. To more recent players, it might not seem so - a factor I must recognize.
As for low-leveled AD&D, I didn't experience this as a problem. Learned fairly quickly that this wasn't Diablo or Final Fantasy where you can aggro any low-level monster in the starting area at practically no risk with a brainless charge. I found initial vulnerability in BG1 to be exciting, was used to this from many earlier pre-generation-snowflake RPGs and it made sense storywise so no complaints.
If you didn't like companions interrupting you in BG2, why did you keep them around? You can just as well get rid of them all and solo the game. One of the many cool things you can do in the game.
The overly gratuitous amount of side quests in BG2 can get annoying but they mostly aren't necessary to beat the game especially if you are solo'ing - which is what you want to do anyway if the companions annoy you :)
The problem with real-time-with-pause combat is the following:
If auto-pause is disabled (or happens not to trigger), combat has a tendency to "run away". Basically, if you can't hit the space bar in time, way too many things happen and things can get really ugly really fast.
If auto-pause is enabled, the battle starts feeling, in a sense, jerky. The problem is that the game's combat lacks the rhythm that you get with true turn-based combat.
The problem with low-level AD&D isn't so much the vulnerability, but rather the low accuracy and the randomness of it. Basically, imaging an RPG where the only attacks that existed were unreliable instant-death attacks. In such an RPG, things could become quite irritating, especially if your attacks keep missing and an enemy happens to get a lucky shot; that's what low level AD&D is like. The fact that the game doesn't implement the death's door rule yet has a "main character dead = game over" rule doesn't help. (Also, a related problem throughout the series is that the game doesn't let you look at the combat log after you die, so you can't see *how* you died; especially since the cause of game over could, for example, be a spell that was cast a little while ago but whose message got buried with all the other messages.)
The reason to use companions in BG2 is that the game is balanced for a party, not a solo character, so by soloing, you upset the balance of the game in many ways.
227: Chrono Trigger.
The SNES version with the Woolsey translation, at least—the retranslation may be more accurate, but it lacks the same charm. Talk about a perfect RPG, though. I love my Planescapes and Arcanums and Fallouts and Baldurs and other obvious PC choices as much as anyone, but Chrono Trigger > everything. A ton of different endings, good characters, a great soundtrack, perfect pacing, plus it pretty much single-handedly popularized new game + mode. And it still holds up more than 20 years later thanks to its great sprite art and solid gameplay.
I'll bite here.
Chrono Trigger is, for the most part, an excellent game. It actually isn't nearly as bogged down in cutscenes as Final Fantasy 6 or 7.
It is not, however, perfect. Here are some problems with it:
1. Accessibility issues. One point requires you to press multiple buttons at the same time. Another part requires that you button mash to continue with the game. These create issues for certain players; the former for players who only have the use of one hand, the latter for players who can't button mash. (That button mashing segment is the one that makes me dread replaying the game, and is something that clearly shouldn't have been in the game in the first place, or at least the game should have allowed you to continue after failing a few times.)
2. Role violations. Most notably, Marle is the primary healer, but yet she gets no multi-target heal, nor does she get a status cure. As is, Frog and Robo are better healers, and Ayla is the only one with a status cure. (I would give Cure the ability to cure status ailments while healing and replace Cure 2 with Heal 2, so that Marle would become the best healer.) I also note that, particularly when you take into account Magic Tabs, that Chrono's most powerful attack spell out-damages Lucca's.
