I was asked randomly today what my top 5 RPG's of all time would be, so thought I would make a post about the ones I chose.
Secret of Mana was a classic back in the SNES days, and what I enjoyed most was the fact that enemies were visible and combat didn't cut away to a fight scene. Final Fantasy VII probably should be in the top spot however I now feel quite strongly about randomly invisible encountering enemies that I knocked it down one. Excellent story and fairly replayable though.
That takes us to the next game, Tales of Symphonia, the best of both worlds. Enemies aren't invisible when running around but they are just representations of the enemies, and the ones you encounter are decided when you run into one of those "blobs". This lets you run around them when you aren't in the mood for fighting and also level up by running around encountering enemies. Fouth is the Gameboy Advance classic , Golden Sun. Excellent old skool RPG, random encounters unfortunately but gave the player the ability to avoid enemies very early on in the game.
As for number five, I couldn't think of anything off hand worthy of being in my top 5, World Of Warcraft technically is an RPG but it isn't the same sort of thing as classic single player RPG's. Morrowind was a nice idea and fairly fun but the system broken down after playing for a while (I hope oblivion will fix these issues), Fable was just simple and limited, Baten Kaitos was pretty good but the voice acting and weak plot let it down. The list goes on with various games but I couldn't really decide on anything worthy of the 5th spot.
I would put Zelda in this list however it really is more of an adventure game since it lacks an overcomplicated plot and large amounts of random numbers. It would be the top of this list if it was though (Link to the Past followed by Ocarina of Time)