Final Fantasy Legend (SaGa)

Final Fantasy Legend is actually SaGa — renamed by Square to leverage the Final Fantasy brand in the West. It was history's first portable RPG, a milestone proving complex experiences could work on a 2.6-inch screen. Characters powered up in radically different ways: humans with consumable items, mutants with random post-battle abilities, monsters by eating enemy meat to transform. The finale — the party climbing a tower to Paradise to literally fight God, discovering he's a sadistic puppeteer — is one of the most audacious and subversive moments in Japanese RPG history.