PS:T, and its inspiration in the console Shadowrun, are both great. But I have to say that my absolute favorite is probably Lufia and the Fortress of Doom.
Obviously on any metric other than the immediate impact of the intro, it loses, but the intro is GOAT. \
(1) It has this cold open that starts when you boot the game the first time.
The music is fantastic. The visuals are solid. The first lines are themselves a masterpiece of economy: "Without warning the island suddenly appeared in the sky." You might argue that "suddenly" and "without warning" are duplicative, but aside from that, it is just perfect. There is an island, it's obviously bad (else why would you need a warning), and it's in the sky. "Four foul and wicked beings claimed it for themselves." Again, brilliant. The alliterative "four foul" is great, but it's also just sufficient to set the stage. There are four bosses you have to worry about. They're bad guys. They're not nuanced angsty teens, they are "foul and wicked beings." The rest of the text is mediocre, but the last line is strong enough to end on: "In desperation, the people called on their bravest fighters: Artea, Guy, Maxim, and Selan." Again, everything you need to know about those characters.
My only grievance is that it is
slightly too slow. Each line stays on the screen for a little too long, overstaying their welcome.
(2) It then cuts from the intro to a
second cold open, in media res, of those four heroes, who are highly leveled, super powerful warriors.
The music is even better than the last, and a complete mood shift from "epic but oppressing" to "epic and exhorting." The use of the black screen for the dialogue is very clever. The dialogue isn't particularly good, but for the standard of 90s jRPGs, not especially bad. The use of an in-game spell for narrative purposes is clever.
(4) You then go through the first dungeon, which is a perfectly serviceable old jRPG dungeon. Significantly, because you start very high level, the "tutorial" aspect of this is that you can do everything you'll ever get to do in the game right away, but you're strong enough that you're not getting killed by the first enemy you meet. There's no handholding, but there's a de facto safety net of lots of HP/MP.
(5) You then fight
and defeat the end bosses.
But the lead two heroes are cut off and doomed in their final victory. "Thus the battle ended." The game then cuts forward 90 years, and you start as a new character at level 1. But the events of the prologue turn out to be the subject matter of the whole game -- the consequences of the past, etc.
* * *
To repeat, I don't think Lufia's intro is better designed, prettier, more fun, better written, or nicer sounding than PS:T's in the sense of some objective standard of good RPG design. But purely on the metric of an intro's effectiveness
as an intro, I think it is probably the best. (Incidentally, I copied it shamelessly for the
start of Infinity.) The rest of Lufia is pretty mediocre. The art and sound are fine, as jRPGs go, but it's super grindy and has a very high random combat encounter rate and a very slow walking speed, all of which combine to make it pretty lame.
[EDIT: The
ending's not bad either.]