Along with a neat, intuitive crafting system and more in-depth use of the summon creatures from previous games, there's a lot going on in FF10—plus it has Blitzball, an underwater football-like minigame that's one of my all-time favourites though everyone else seems to hate it.
Even if the story, involving a giant city-destroying whale and time travel of a sort doesn't suit you, the tropical fantasy setting is original and still evocative more than 15 years later. It's one of my favourite games ever made and I play it every couple of years. There you go. FF, meanwhile, picks up after the city-destroying whale is gone—and the world is a cheerier place. It brings revamped combat, built on a job system where your party can switch roles mid-battle. The tone is noticeably sillier and more slapstick than the first game, which doesn't appeal to me too much.
That said, I know a whole bunch of people love 's all-female cast, and the choice to travel where you want from the start of the game is bold and interesting, even if the main story arc is dull compared to the first game. Wes: I couldn't care less about Tidus, Yuna and crew, but I love the battle systems of both games. It's super fast-paced but miles deep, and swapping jobs mid-battle and gradually collecting skills that work well together is JRPG combat at its best.
Plus, both games look great on PC thanks to some HD touching up, and they'll run on years-old hardware, even integrated graphics. What a combo. With the guidance of Tear, her loan shark turned business partner, Recette splits time between bartering with customers, arranging her shop, and diving into randomly-generated dungeons for marketable loot.
Each day, Recette chooses what to do with the four time-slots between sunup and sundown while the calendar marches towards her next loan payment. The whole thing is this bundle of sunshine and sweetness, even though it's about being crushed by debt. Recettear became the first Japanese indie game to release on Steam when it was translated and localized for Western audiences in Recettear offsets the repetitive burden of shop-ownership with the repetitive demands of dungeon crawling in just the right ratio to make both more engaging than they would have been alone.
To its benefit, Recettear scrapes the surface of systems like party management that are often deeper in larger games without allowing them to weigh down the flow between activities. Despite its age, Recettear continues to spread by word-of-mouth and inspire new indie games like Moonlighter to emulate its management-meets-dungeon-crawler hook.
Developer: Zeboyd Games Link: Humble. With Cosmic Star Heroine, the team set their sights on Chrono Trigger and Phantasy Star and made this tight sci-fi RPG with a clever, brisk battle system that requires some real thought and planning.
Combat revolves around abilities that can only be used once until you defend, turning battles into strategic matches where defending at the right time is especially important. The story outside of battles is just as brisk as the fights, making Cosmic Star Heroine the rare JRPG that doesn't outstay its welcome. It's less homage than it is a thoughtful take on how JRPGs were made 20 years ago, and how they could've been done better.
Developer: Nihon Falcom Link: Humble. Forget the slow tedium of turn-based battles: Oath in Felghana is a run-and-slash action RPG with some seriously intense bullet-hell boss battles set to a killer synth rock soundtrack.
Wes: This is going to come across as a strange endorsement, but I don't think the first chapter of Trails in the Sky, likely Nihon Falcom's most beloved RPG series, is anything special.
The character archetypes and dialogue and general vibe are about as straightforward anime JRPG as they come. The turn-based battle system is pretty straightforward, with just enough complexity to get by thanks to the way you mix magical orbs to unlock new spells.
Fans like to point out that every NPC in the game has their own little life, with new dialogue to discover every time you go back to them across a sprawling journey. And that is true, but it's all the same basic, largely uninteresting RPG background patter you've seen before. Because, while I think Trails in the Sky is actually a pretty average JRPG, it does a remarkably good job of introducing you to its world to tell a larger story, continued directly in this sequel.
It's a slow burn that makes you invested in the Bracer Guild a sort of anime civilian marshal service , several kingdoms with their own political machinations and rich history, and characters that manage to be endearing in spite of their tropes. The individual story beats may often be cliche, but over the course of two games Trails in the Sky manages to go deep and wide, giving you the satisfaction of solving small mysteries and saving whole countries.
If that world pulls you in, you'll have a pair of games that tell a single, sprawling story across a hundred hours, like a longform TV show. Eric Watson: Battle Chasers: Nightwar tackles the tedium of traditional JRPG turn-based combat by turning every fight into a tense interplay of meaningful tactics. In lieu of the usual basic attacks and damage spells, each character and enemy has a wide variety of actions and abilities, and most battles are tense and meaningful. The UI is also a big winner, making it easy to keep track of initiative, hit points, and the constant buffs and debuffs that every fight produces.
One of my favorite visual touches is the banter that heroes and foes trade during combat, which adds playful personality to a game already brimming with character. Read more: Battle Chasers: Nightwar review.
Developer: Level-5 Link: Steam. It's an open-world action JRPG, but at its heart is a building sim where you've got a top-down view of a dollhouse-like kingdom. You raise buildings, generate resources, assign personnel and research tactics and sciences. Managing your kingdom is not just a thing to do between quests.
It's the reason you quest. It took me 50 hours to finish Ni No Kuni 2 with many side quests left over, and my eyes were silver dollars the entire time. I always wanted something. Hell, I wanted it all. The cycle of discovering, working toward, and finally unlocking things in Evermore delivers a gratifying sense of ownership. Combat improvements are especially rewarding because the real-time battle system is just plain fun. I always have a good time when I stumble on a wyvern-filled cave tucked away in Autmunia.
You use light and heavy attacks to build combos, punctuate those combos with flashy AoEs and finishes, and dodge and block enemy attacks in-between.
You build a party of three characters and swap between them whenever you want, and you will want to because everyone has a different moveset and unique skills. On top of normal third-person fights, there's a Dynasty Warriors-esque skirmish mode where Evan takes to the field surrounded by squads of chibi soldiers. It plays like a simple rock-paper-scissors RTS where you rotate units based on what the enemy is weak to, but rock-paper-scissors has never been so tense.
Read more: Ni No Kuni 2 review. This hybrid progression system creates plenty of scope for theorycrafting, and the skills are exciting to use—an essential prerequisite for games that rely so heavily on combat encounters. The local demons and warlords that terrorize each portion of the world are well sketched out in the scrolling text NPC dialogue and found journals.
Release date: Developer: Square Enix Steam. The smartest Final Fantasy game finally got a PC port in The game can't render the sort of streaming open worlds we're used to these days, but the art still looks great, and the gambit system is still one of the most fun party development systems in RPG history. Gambits let you program party members with a hierarchy of commands that they automatically follow in fights.
You're free to build any character in any direction you wish. You can turn the street urchin Vaan into a broadsword-wielding combat specialist or a elemental wizard. The port even includes a fast-forward mode that make the grinding painless. We loved the original Legend of Grimrock and the way it embraced the old Dungeon Master model of making your party—mostly a collection of stats—explore the world one square at a time. The one drawback is that it was too literal of a dungeon crawler. The enemies might change, but for the most part you kept trudging down what seemed like the same series of corridors until the game's end.
The sequel, though, focuses on both the dank dungeons and the bright, open world above, resulting in a nostalgic romp that's immensely enjoyable and filled with even deadlier enemies and more challenging puzzles. As with the first outing, much of its power springs from the element of surprise. One moment you'll be merrily hacking through enemies with ease, and the next you might find yourself face-to-face with an unkillable demon.
And then you'll run, and you discover that there are sometimes almost as many thrills in flight as in the fight. Release date: Developer: tobyfox Humble Store , Steam. Play only the first 20 minutes, and Undertale might seem like yet another JRPG tribute game, all inside jokes about Earthbound and Final Fantasy coated with bright sugary humor and endearingly ugly graphics. But take it as a whole and find out that it isn't all bright and sugary after all , and it's an inventive, heartfelt game. It's a little unsettling how slyly it watches us, remembering little things and using our preconceptions about RPGs to surprise and mortify and comfort.
Undertale certainly sticks out among all these cRPGs, but looking past its bullet hell-style combat and disregard for things like leveling and skill trees, it's got what counts: great storytelling and respect for player decisions. It isn't quite the accomplishment of its cousin, Pillars of Eternity, but Tyranny's premise sets it apart from other RPGs.
Playing as an agent of evil could've been expressed with pure, bland sadism, but instead Tyranny focuses on the coldness of bureaucracy and ideological positioning. As a 'Fatebinder' faithful to conqueror Kyros the Overlord—yep, sounds evil—you're tasked with mediating talks between her bickering armies and engaging with rebels who fight despite obvious doom, choosing when to sympathize with them and when to eradicate them, most of the time striking a nasty compromise that balances cruelty and political positioning.
The latter is achieved through a complex reputation system that, unlike many other morality meters, allows fear and loyalty to coexist with companions and factions. As with Pillars, Tyranny's pauseable realtime combat and isometric fantasy world are a throwback to classic cRPGs, but not as a vehicle for nostalgia—it feels more like the genre had simply been hibernating, waiting for the right time to reemerge with all the creativity it had before.
This excellent free-to-play action RPG is heaven for players that enjoy stewing over builds to construct the most effective killing machine possible. As you plough through enemies and level up, you travel across this huge board, tailoring your character a little with each upgrade. Gear customization is equally detailed. Every piece of armor has an arrangement of slots that take magic gems. These gems confer stat bonuses and bonus adjacency effects when set in the right formations.
You might begin Darkest Dungeon as you would an XCOM campaign: assembling a team of warriors that you've thoughtfully named, decorated, and upgraded for battle. How naive! Inevitably, your favorite highwayman gets syphilis. Your healer turns masochistic, and actually begins damaging herself each turn.
Your plague doctor gets greedy, and begins siphoning loot during each dungeon run. A few hours into the campaign, your precious heroes become deeply flawed tools that you either need to learn how to work with, or use until they break, and replace like disposable batteries.
With Lovecraft's hell as your workplace, Darkest Dungeon is about learning how to become a brutal and effective middle manager. Your heroes will be slaughtered by fishmen, cultists, demons, and foul pigmen as you push through decaying halls, but more will return to camp with tortured minds or other maladies.
Do you spend piles of gold to care for them, or put those resources toward your ultimate goal? Darkest Dungeon is a brilliant cohesion of art, sound, writing, and design. The colorful, hand-drawn horrors pop from the screen, showing their influence but never feeling derivative.
It's a hard game, but once you understand that everyone is expendable—even the vestal with kleptomania you love so much—Darkest Dungeon's brutality becomes a fantastic story-generator more than a frustration. Get those horses looking nice and crisp with the best gaming monitors available today. There are few games that get medieval combat right, and fewer still that add a strategic, army-building component. The metagame of alliance-making, marriage, looting, and economics underpinning these battles makes Warband a satisfying game of gathering goods, enemies, and friendship.
We loved BioWare's original Neverwinter Nights from and especially its expansions , but as a single-player experience, Neverwinter Nights 2 was in a class all of its own. Whereas the original had a fairly weak main campaign that mainly seemed aimed at showing what the DM kit was capable of, Obsidian Entertainment managed to equal and arguably outdo BioWare's storytelling prowess in the sequel when it took over the helm.
The whole affair brimmed with humor, and companions such as the raucous dwarf Khelgar Ironfist still have few rivals in personality nine years later.
And the quality just kept coming. Shades of The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past reveal themselves in the masterful Shadow of the Betrayer expansion's focus on two halves of the same world, but Obsidian skillfully uses that familiar framework to deliver an unforgettable commentary on religion. Few games are as staunchly open-world—and unforgiving—as Gothic 2.
The first time we played it, we left town in the wrong direction and immediately met monsters many levels higher than us, and died horribly. Lesson learned. It sounds like Gothic 2 is too punishing, but we love the way it forces us to learn our way through its world. Pick a direction and run. A random chat with an NPC will lead you to a far-off dungeon, searching for a legendary relic.
You could be picking berries on the side of a mountain and discover a dragon. Oops, accidental dragon fight. Some on the PC Gamer team keep a modded-up Skyrim install handy, just in case they feel like adventure. Release date: Developer: Obsidian Entertainment Steam. The sequel to the marvellous Pillars of Eternity ventures to the archipelago of Deadfire. You, and your party of adventurers, need to pursue a rampaging god, but to reach it you first you need to learn to sail the high seas aboard The Defiant.
On the ocean you can explore and can plunder enemy vessels for loot, which you can then use to upgrade your ship. When you dock at a port the game switches back to classic top-down cRPG view and you're treated to elaborate and beautifully rendered locations.
Designer Paul Neurath originally conceived of a dungeon simulator that would turn traditional role-playing conventions on their head. Called Underworld, he and his team, the future Looking Glass Studios, built a game that rewarded real-world thinking to solve puzzles and please NPCs. Ultima developer Origin Systems was so impressed by the three-dimensional engine you could look up and down!
Characters that are normally enemies are friends in Underworld, and we love that you may not be able to tell. Underworld was a technological marvel in , but while the graphics are dated, the feeling of exploring the Stygian Abyss is just as exciting today.
Divinity was a Kickstarter success story that still somehow took us by surprise. Larian designed encounters thinking that someone could always disagree, or ruin things for you, or even kill the NPC you need to talk to—meaning that quests have to be solvable in unorthodox ways. The writing in Divinity is consistently top-notch.
Alliances are made, then broken, then remade in the aftermath. Choices you think are good just turn out to betray other characters. The end result is possibly the most nuanced take on The Force in the entire Star Wars Expanded Universe, and definitely its most complex villains.
A fan-made mod restores much of that content, including a droid planet, and fixes lots of outstanding bugs, showing yet again that PC gamers will work hard to maintain their favorite games. The endgame includes some particularly sloggy dungeons, but no other game truly drops you into a Vampire world. This is truly a cult classic of an RPG, and the fanbase has been patching and improving the game ever since release.
Vampire: The Masquerade—Bloodlines 2 is currently in development. Read everything we know about it in preparation for what could be another addition to this list in Release date: Developer: Blizzard Battle. More importantly, it manages to offer a variety of potential paths forward that only reveal themselves based on how you navigate its complex web of choices.
Just look at Mass Effect 2. Mass Effect 2 is arguably the closest BioWare came to realizing their most ambitious design ideas. Despite working with often against a scope that would make most studios weep in the corner, BioWare packed this sequel with a legion of memorable characters with their own complicated arcs that slowly reveal themselves as you brazenly explore a galaxy that feels ready to open up or crumble at your feet at any time.
Mass Effect 2 does all of that and still manages to be a blast to play throughout. The Witcher 3 has side stories that would be worthy of campaigns in lesser games. Many of us grew up dreaming of being thrown in an elaborate medieval fantasy world where we truly felt like the hero that could shape the fortunes of all, and The Witcher 3 might just be the ultimate piece of sword and sorcery fantasy wish fulfillment.
Look, I could sit here all day and talk about the virtues of Final Fantasy 6 or even how its best moments are still capable of reducing gamers to tears. I could tell you about the heroes, the villains, the plot beats, and all the other things that make this game the classic that few will debate that it is. Instead, I want to talk about how Final Fantasy 6 changed how so many of us look at gaming.
This was the kind of game you begged people to play and it was the kind of game that made you pledge your allegiance to the very concept of gaming. Well, Diablo 2 did all of that and made the whole thing so much better that you rarely even hear people talk about the original Diablo anymore.
If the highlight of an RPG is that moment when you so completely lose yourself in its world that the troubles of your own existence leave your mind, Diablo 2 arguably reaches that point faster than almost any other RPG ever made. WoW may require one hell of a commitment to get the most out of it, and the game has had some ups and downs over the years, but the fact of the matter is that there is really no other RPG that can offer what the best moments in WoW history have to offer.
Chrono Trigger is an almost flawless game that not only combines so many of the things that we love about RPGs but arguably perfects them. Assembled by a dream team of some of the best JRPG creators ever, Chrono Trigger makes even the most seemingly mundane elements of its adventure feel absolutely joyful.
When this game wants to go big, though, it does it in a way that few other games could ever dream of topping. Chrono Trigger is simply one of the best examples of curated RPG design that has ever or will ever be crafted.
Matthew Byrd SilverTuna Matthew Byrd is a freelance writer and entertainment enthusiast living in Brooklyn.
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