The first game is probably my favourite JRPG of all time. It does so many great things in moving the genre forward and stop the player faffing around managing items, backtracking for quests and having to re-do large parts of the game because you died on a boss.

It helped tremendously that it came out on the Wii in the UK and never reached the USA. This meant Nintendo drew on a 100% British voice cast for all the characters, a rarity in JRPGs at that point. It was nice to have a properly localised Japanese game. (I have high hopes that one day they might bring The Last Story to modern consoles)

We will differ in opinion here in that Im not a fan of the second game. I did sink about 20 hours into it and thought Torna started off ok. My problem with 2 is that they undid the no-backtracking on fetch quests and I just cannot stand Pyra and Mythra. They lean so far into anime tropes it borders on parody with one the subservient maid and the other the petulant brat.

The clear fan service in the designs was one thing but their personalities for me at least set back the representation of female characters in RPGs, especially as Sharla and Melia were such brilliant characters in the first one.

X was a decent game let down by some silly mechanics. For example once you get the cool transformer mechs you have to, and I’m not joking here, buy some Tom Nook-level insurance premium on them so if they did in combat you get them repaired. Die 3 times (or once without insurance) and you have to spend a LOT of money buying a whole new one.