I've tried to play some of the newer pokemon games, official and fan made, but I can't get over the combat anymore. :/
Pokemon is so extraordinarily slow and lethargic, so that most likely isn't helping here.
From where I'm sitting, years removed from touching most of them:
1 - You can probably safely never return to this or bother playing it for the first time.
2 - Near-universally hated, I've personally never played it. It's likely too old to have a story or characters that are compelling without a full-blown remake.
3 - If you play this one, it's just for the Job System. Which is still pretty fun, even with the DS version ports.
4 - Even with as repetitive as some of the story beats become, it's still a good romp. The fact that there are many version available is nice too; I didn't hate the DS remake.
5 - Never played it. Ostensibly FF3 but better, with an actual cast of characters. Lots of people love it.
6 - People have threatened me if I badmouth it! Just avoid the PS1 port and you're probably golden. A classic, and all that jazz.
7 - If anything I would hope that Eternal Crisis 1) gets finished and 2) releases onto lots of platforms. As-is playing a PC version with extensive use of visual mods is probably the best way to go about it, because the primitive PS1 graphics weren't really charming circa 1999 and they're even worse now if you don't have nostalgia. I actually kind of like the cast and characters, and will be keen to revisit this one myself in the coming years to properly explore its narrative themes now that I'm wise enough to actually understand them. Also,
word of warning: FF7 Remake is
not a Remake. (Legitimate spoilers)
It's a sequel to the entire Compilation of FF7. You actually need to play the original FF7, and ostensibly watch Advent Children and play Crisis Core and Dirge of Cerberus at a minimum, if you want to fully understand and appreciate the Remake-Rebirth-Re(union?) narrative.
8 - Fucking fever dream, man. I think if you've played it once before, the only reason you really go back is to find new and faster ways to break the shit outta the game using Triple Triad and the various mechanisms.
9 - Timeless. The only reason I could see for not wanting to replay this every so often when the mood strikes is because you want to put distance between your last playthrough and the totally-coming-soon-where-is-it Remake they're getting ready to release.
10 - It's character-based turn-based, the cast and narrative are top notch, it is still the defacto recommended starting place for people new to the series.
11 - Um... it's not easy to get into, it has a monthly fee attached, it's better to experience with 1~5 friends over many, many,
many drunken weekends. But the narratives are all good, the gameplay is fucking incredible if you have any interest whatsoever in experimentation, min-maxing, experiencing what a "forever" game looks like, and it's genuinely got one of the most immersive worlds I've ever seen. If you put a lot into XI, you get a lot out of XI.
12 - I absolutely hated most aspects of the game on the original PS2 release. Zodiac Age is the "improved" version, and changes a lot of things, but I haven't played that - and I don't know that it could truly change enough to make this one truly worth it. It has an incredibly loyal following, so clearly it does something right for some people, but approach with caution.
13 - I'm sorry, but this game has no redeeming qualities. You literally spend 28~30 hours in what amounts to Tutorial Mode before the game unceremoniously drops you into a slightly more open-ended endgame scenario, with an utterly ludicrous and counterintuitive difficulty spike for good measure. The best parts of the narrative are thrown into the Datalog, basically an in-game journal, and never touched upon by the game itself. The cast is all over the place and most aren't great or fall short. The gameplay has promise, but that promise is basically never realized. The sequels both throw the baby out with the bathwater and don't capitalize on a single piece of it, either.
14 - I hate it. It is, far and away, the game I have spent the most time with. I've spent more time on this game than most people will spend time playing games in totality in their
entire lifetime. Everything about it is offensive to what I like and enjoy and want out of both a single-player story-driven RPG
and an MMO
and a "forever game." You can play it for free using their Free Trial which covers the base game and the first two expansions if you're feeling up to it. All told would take you somewhere between 180 and 200 hours to reach the end of depending on how much you got distracted by side content/fluff. You don't have to play with other people very much, and the game is very easy and forgiving. So... form your own opinion if it's on your list. You're not missing out on anything if you don't.
15 - Just skip it. It's forever unfinished, again having tons of its story shoved into in-game journals, into external movies, animes, books, DLC. The core gameplay isn't good. Everything is too big, it takes too long to get anywhere, there's no point exploring because everything respawns and there's almost nothing in the way of "unique" treasure, the hunts - one of XII's biggest draws - are all just recycled from the story missions. There may as well not be any sidequests. It's notable only in that I don't hate it like I hate XIII and XIV, I'm just very disappointed and apathetic towards it.
16 - (Edit: Worth clarifying that I haven't played this one yet! But this seems fairly obvious and should be a non-controversial view.) Ostensibly if you don't like Devil May Cry or Character-Action games, you shouldn't really look at this one. It's not an RPG. It really doesn't want to be an Action-RPG either, by all accounts. The narrative apparently has many of the same problems XII's does, in addition to some things that can really get under your skin pending your exact sensitivity to current real-world problems.
Cheating:
Lost Odyssey (X360/One/Series) - It's awesome, go play it if you can.
Bravely Default (NDS) - It's pretty awesome, you should definitely try to experience it if you can.
Octopath Traveler - It comes up a bit short in some regards, but this is probably more the direction I would have liked FF itself to gravitate towards instead of getting increasingly less-RPG-more-Action.
