INTRO
I didn’t always love RPGs. My taste in games as a child was shaped by whatever disks or cartidges I had inherited from strangers and older siblings, and when I did spend allowance on a game, I went for whatever I thought looked cool, regardless of genre. Pokemon, Megaman Battle Network, Kingdom Hearts, and Knights of the Old Republic were among the earliest RPGs I played, but when I became a teenager and had more agency over my game diet, I went all-in on shooters. Halo, Doom, Marathon, Quake 1-3, Jedi Outcast, Star Wars Battlefront, Half-Life 2, Team Fortress 2, and Borderlands defined my teenage and college years. I feel like I practically grew up in Sidewinder and Blood Gulch!
But I think as mass shootings had become more commonplace in America, as I grew older and came to appreciate competitive multiplayer less and affective storytelling and strategic gameplay more, and as I’ve shifted away from PC gaming, my enthusiasm for shooting in games cooled and I have since become very much an RPG person. It’s kind of funny looking at my creative output and seeing the change: pre-2016 me made action games, but post-2019 me makes RPGs. What I found interesting to explore in the medium began its reversal in my early 20’s, which was also, not coincidentally, a few years after I started going out of my way to engage with the RPG canon (and beyond!).
Many recent conversations with friends and acquaintances about “the greatest RPGs of all time” and the discourse around Expedition 33 and whether or not it is really all that different from other recent examples of the genre has reminded me of how difficult it is for a normal person to have a firsthand understanding of the history of any game genre, and most of us just have our own personal histories to rely upon.
I forget who, but someone on the SMPS Discord presented a list of their personal top 20 RPGs, and so I originally set out to do the same as a fun little exercise, to establish my own personal perspective into the genre. To that end, I started digging through my collection, my library, my old blog posts, and my memories, and before I knew it, I had identified and ranked 84 RPGs I had played over the course of my life (which doesn't include another 20 games I played but am not comfortable judging - more on that later).
Reviewing all of those games sounds insane. Let’s do it.
WHAT'S ON THE LIST
Every digital RPG that I played until completion and feel comfortable passing judgment upon is on the list. If a game has RPG elements and isn’t firmly classified as another genre, I’m counting it as an RPG. This mostly means that I'm counting the occasional "narrative adventure game" made in RPG Maker as an RPG. While TRPGs often feel more akin to strategy games to me... RPG is in the name, and there's enough leveling up and text boxes happening that it scratches the RPG itch close enough. Both of those sorts of games are in conversation with more traditional RPGs, so it felt better to have them on the list than not.
The list also includes games that I did not finish but am comfortable passing judgment upon, which usually means that I got through most of it but disliked it. In other words, I had a very solid understanding of what the game was like and safely assumed that its ending, no matter how good it was, could not redeem it.
There is one MMO and a couple roguelikes on the list that I never “beat” or necessarily got very far in per se, but given that those subgenres are designed for indefinite play, I felt like I got a good sample of what they were like, so they too are on the list.
WHAT'S NOT ON THE LIST
If a game has RPG elements, but the consensus is that it specifically belongs to other genres, then it is not included on the list. Although Iji has player progression systems and a branching narrative, it is generally considered to be an action platformer, and does not make the list.
At one point, I considered including tabletop RPGs on the list, as running a campaign of Dungeons & Dragons in this past year has had a profound influence on how I think about the genre, but I think it’s hard to compare what is essentially just a collection of rules to the preestablished campaigns of videogames.
Ongoing episodic games are not on the list. This specifically means that, although I loved Deltarune's first two chapters, I cannot pass judgment on it as a whole just yet.
With one exception, freeware indie games that are made by people I know are not on this list. It feels like opening a can of worms to numerically compare such games to blockbuster titans like Mass Effect and Final Fantasy VII, or, more importantly, to compare friends' games to each other. The only exception I made is for a game that hits well above its weight class. Small indie games by strangers of sufficient popularity are fair game.
Most importantly, games that I did not finish but am uncomfortable passing judgment upon are not on this list. This includes games that I enjoyed but did not finish for one reason or another (Persona 3 FES, Chrono Trigger, Planescape Torment, Fire Emblem (GBA), Dragon Age: Origins, Fallout New Vegas, Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Divinity: Original Sin), games that I respected but didn’t vibe with (Dark Souls, Final Fantasy VI, Hades, Earthbound, and Torchlight II), games that I disliked and DNF’ed within hours (The Witcher, Neverwinter Nights, Digimon Masters, and Digimon Story Moonlight), and the Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, which is in the weird special category of me having made it about halfway through while also feeling totally neutral about the experience.
HOW THE GAMES ARE RANKED
I’m trying my best to rank these games from worst to best, not least favorite to most favorite. Because this list includes everything I played, including games I maybe played once when I was in elementary school, my memory of many of these games may be lacking. But the one thing I remember about each of these games is how they made me feel, so purely by necessity, that’s my primary metric. If I remember more about a game and I can make a more holistic, thoughtful evaluation, then I do.
To help contextualize both the work and my relationship of it, I’m including not only the game’s developer and year, but the subgenre, when I last played it, how often I played it (if more than once), and how well I remember it. If I didn’t finish a game, that is noted as well. Basically, if I ranked your favorite game low and I played it a decade ago and my memory of it is hazy, take it with a grain of salt. You're probably right and I am probably a fool.
And finally, while I normally try to be positive when talking about media on this blog, and I am definitely celebrating about 2/3 of the games on this list, the nature of this endeavor means that the first third of this list will be a downer. Tearing apart some particularly godawful games admittedly feels good, but being honest about how disappointing others were, especially when they're games that friends of mine love, brings me little pleasure. I'm sorry.
REGARDING IMAGES USED
I normally try to be careful with where I source images from for my blog posts, but given just how many games there are here, I couldn't be as picky or thorough this time. I'm just giving a blanket disclaimer here that none of the box art images or screenshots used are mine.
REGARDING SPOILERS
Fair warning: I try to avoid talking about plot details in these games, but when I do, I tag meaningful spoilers to games I think you should play that came out within the past 5 years. If I think the game isn't worth your time, or it's been out for a while, I don't bother.
THE LIST
The original draft of this list without images was 60 pages long, so for readability, I'm splitting it into three parts. Part 1 covers games #84-51, Part 2 covers #50-21, and Part 3 covers the top 20.
Without further ado, let's get into the list! The worst RPG I've ever played is...
84) Digimon World: Next Order (BB Studio, 2016)
Subgenre: Virtual pet JRPG
Played: 1 year ago
Memory of it: fresh enough
DNF
What a waste of fucking time and an insult to the 1999 cult classic virtual pet RPG whose legacy it carries. God, I am so pissed! The original Digimon World is a polarizing game to begin with. Its tedium, unconventional progression, and obtuse mechanics had to be counterbalanced by charm and what I now recognize as careful design decisions that make the game playable. Next Order takes Digimon World and removes all of the good parts, keeps the bad parts, and then shits all over it.
Gone are the gorgeous prerendered backgrounds, the mystery, and the charm. Gone are the memorizable enemy movement patterns and the dynamic battle locations (now everything is forced into the exact same tiny circle). They added a dumb tropey story with human side characters to a game that was genius because its open structure did away with the main quest/side quest dichotomy.
It’s hard to explain why Next Order is so much worse than the original game because it has less to do with any one single thing and more to do with the details. Here’s one example. In the original Digimon World, you spend a lot of time training your Digimon at the gym. You go to a piece of gym equipment, hit a button, watch an animation, hit the button again to stop the animation, and watch your monster’s stats go up. You spend a lot of time in the game training, so it’s a little tedious, but at least it’s frictionless.
In Next Order, they tried to improve this system in the worst way possible. Instead of just pressing a button, you now have to press the button at the right time to get the best results for the training. Does it make training more interesting? Not really! Does it add serious friction to what was already the game’s most tedious recurring mechanic? God, it sure fucking does! Now instead of mindlessly pressing buttons for the most boring part of the game, I have to take my time and pay attention the whole time, which makes it even worse! And now it takes longer too!
I could go into detail about what a fatal misstep it was to give the player two partner Digimon instead of one this time around (short version: it’s twice the tedium instead of twice the fun!), but I don’t want Next Order to steal any more time from me than it already has.
The female player character design is so fucking dumb. What the fuck is happening with her skirt? I hate this game so much.
83) Digimon Adventure: Anode/Cathode Tamer (Bandai?, 1999)
Subgenre: TRPG
Played: ~5 years ago
Memory of it: Fair
DNF
It’s a bare-bones TRPG with really slow combat.
82) Digimon Story (aka Digimon World DS) (BEC, 2006)
Subgenre: Monster-collecting JRPG
Played: ~10-15 years ago
Memory of it: Bare
You’re going to notice a recurring pattern with the lowest entries on this list. I am a diehard Digimon fan, but most Digimon games are really bad, so they are going to litter the bottom.
Digimon Story is a totally forgettable game! I remember the core gameplay and rolling credits, and that’s it. While Cyber Sleuth and Time Stranger would go on to redeem the Digimon Story subseries, the original Nintendo DS games are godawful! Next!
81) Digimon World 3 (BEC, 2002)
Subgenre: Turn-based JRPG
Played: Twice, ~5 and 15 years ago
Memory of it: Fair
DNF
Digimon World 3 has its fans, and the evolution system is neat, but at the end of the day, it is the most generic of the Digimon RPGs (unlike Next Order, it has nothing in common with the original Digimon World). The early game is fine, but by the midpoint, you hit a section that requires a ton of backtracking through random encounters, and whenever I hit that part, I drop it. It isn’t worth it.
80) Digimon World Re:Digitize (tri-Crescendo, 2012)
Subgenre: Virtual pet JRPG
Played: ~10 years ago
Memory of it: Hazy
4 years before Next Order, and 13 years after Digimon World, we finally got the first follow-up to the original. Re:Digitize never saw a Western release, but I played it with a translation patch. And it was a huge disappointment!
Most of the sins from this game carried over to Next Order and are already described there. This entry is higher on the list because it was actually bearable enough that I could complete it.
79) The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (Bethesda, 2011)
Subgenre: Open world action RPG
Played: 13 years ago
Memory of it: Hazy
(Helen, if you're reading this I'm sorry.)
I played through the main story, was underwhelmed, and quit. “But Alex! You’re playing Skyrim wrong! Bethesda’s games are all about the side content!” But if the game doesn’t want me to do the main quest, then why is it so urgent? Why prioritize this one mediocre questline above all of the allegedly better content?
I’m frustrated that Skyrim is the model for open world exploration in games. The main quest/side quest dichotomy present in almost all of these games nearly always undermines the premise. The best open world games I’ve played are the ones where the “optional” content is the main content, best demonstrated with Sable, which I warmly reviewed in a previous post, but also well demonstrated by the original Digimon World and, now that I think of it, Pokemon Scarlet and Violet. If freedom and exploration are supposed to be the point of the game, make that the focus! Do away with the linear primary questline! Everything the player does should connect back to their primary objective, not just some of it!
But whatever, fine, maybe I played Skyrim wrong. We all know that Bethesda’s writers still suck, though. Fallout New Vegas proved to me that I could like this sort of game if it was actually well-written, by someone else.
I enjoyed turning off the UI and taking screenshots of the wilderness.
78) Digimon World 2 (BEC, 2000)
Subgenre: Dungeon crawler
Played: One and a half times, originally ~10 years ago
Memory of it: Pretty good
Digi think I was done?
Like Digimon World 3, and unlike Re:Digitize and Next Order, this game has little in common with other entries in the Digimon World series. This is a game where you travel around in randomly generated dungeons with a team of Digimon in a tank, mystery dungeon style.
I don’t know if I’ve ever played a game that disrespects my time more. Everything about this game makes it drag. The battle animations are some of the slowest in any turn-based RPG I’ve ever played. Just watch a gameplay sample and see for yourself.
The character progression system is brutal. Every Digimon in the game has a level cap. In order to raise the level cap, you must take two Digimon and combine them into a new one, which is cool, except the new Digimon is at a lower level than the last one. So now you’re down two party members and in their place you have a baby that you have to grind back up to where everyone else in your team is at.
If you don’t come into a dungeon with exactly the right parts equipped to your tank, or the right items, or your luck is bad and you hit an energy bug that drains all of your vehicle’s energy, you get beamed back to base and have to go through the whole dungeon all over again.
It isn't all bad. The soundtrack goes hard sometimes. The loop of clearing dungeons, recruiting new Digimon, upgrading your beetle, prepping, and setting out again can be fun. I somehow endured it when I was a college student with lots of free time. I could never do it now.
I once watched a video essay from someone who played Digimon World 2 for the first time and developed mental health issues and nearly quit Youtube because of this game. Clearing Digimon World 2 is for masochists.
Still a better game than Next fucking Order.
77) Digimon Adventure (flash) (FoxKids.com, 2001)
Subgenre: Mini turn-based RPG
Played: Repeatedly, ~24 years ago
Memory of it: Fair
Fox Kids had a lot of little Digimon Flash games on their website, and this one, despite being named Digimon Adventure, was made to promote Digimon Tamers. You walk around, solve some puzzles, talk to some folks, engage in turn-based battles, learn new moves, and grow stronger. That’s some RPG shit right there. The whole thing maybe took a half hour to play through tops?
I watched a video about it recently, and surprise surprise, it doesn’t hold up. But I remember it at the time as being the best of the Digimon Flash games, as low a bar as it was.
In hindsight, Digimon Adventure was the first mini-RPG I played! It definitely opened my eyes to how you could provide a satisfying, self-contained, RPG experience in such a small package, a decade before I discovered indie devs doing the same thing. Thanks Digimon Adventure!
76) Runescape (Jagex, 2001)
Subgenre: MMORPG
Played: Persistently, ~18-20 years ago
Memory of it: Hazy
DNF
When I logged into Runescape in middle school, I had no MMORPG literacy. My friends who played World of Warcraft blew my mind when I they told me that it cost a monthly fee. There was no way my parents would pay that.
But Runescape was free. So I, the friendless Dragonlord199X, wandered around the fantasy countryside, trying to make money selling chicken meat to other players. The only player who was interested was another loser who also had no money.
I got bored and attacked some cows. Everybody else seemed cooler and more powerful than me, and I didn’t know how to be like them.
75) Megaman Battle Network 4: Red Sun (Capcom, 2003)
Subgenre: This is tough. Wikipedia calls it a tactical RPG? Let’s go with that.
Played: 2-3 years ago
Memory of it: Pretty good
I played a lot of Megaman Battle Network 3 and a liiittle bit of MMBN5 as a kid, so I jumped at the chance to play through the whole series when the Battle Network Legacy Collection came out a few years back.
For those unfamiliar: Megaman Battle Network was a cyberpunk(?) JRPG series for the Game Boy Advance in the early 2000s with a unique battle system. The protagonist, Lan, sends his AI partner (or Net Navi), Megaman, into the internet to explore cyberspace and battle viruses and other Net Navis. Battles take place in turns, where at the start of the turns, Lan draws a random number of “battle chips” from a “folder” the way that you draw cards from a deck. You choose chips from your hand to use for the turn, and then switch to a timed live-action combat segment where you move around a grid like a board game piece and execute the moves you prepared. Its like if you combined a turn-based RPG with a trading card game with a fighting game with chess… and it works so well! God, the deck building and combat engages the brain on so many levels and it is so much fun! Easily one of the best battle systems in a videogame ever, and I haven't seen it replicated as well since. I gave One Step from Eden a shot, and it just didn’t click for me (probably because it did away with the turn-based system).
Ugh MMBN's battle system is so goddamn good!!!
Anyway, MMBN is a great series, but everyone agrees that Battle Network 4 sucks. Lan enters Megaman in a netbattle tournament and then goes and saves the world. And that’s kinda it. I think I had other reasons for disliking this one. Is this the most racist one, or was that Battle Network 2? I forget.
The penultimate boss fight against Dark Mega – an enemy that can do literally anything to you that you’ve been doing to everyone else all game – was awesome and one of the highlights of the whole franchise. It may have subconsciously inspired my favorite boss in Jailbird Nocturne, but I just wish this fight was in a better game (yes I know there's a version of the fight in BN5 but that one isn't as good).
74) Champions of Norrath: Realms of EverQuest (Snowblind Studios, 2004)
Subgenre: Hack-n-slash action RPG
Played: Repeatedly, 15-20 years ago
Memory of it: Hazy
I have lots of fond memories playing this co-op with friends and family in the mid 2000s, and for that, I am genuinely grateful for my time with Champions of Norrath. But as for the game itself, I mostly just remember wandering through a bunch of procedurally generated hallways and hitting monsters with your weapons. There were lots of women with big boobs in chainmail bikinis. The whole thing felt very same-y.
73) Caves of Qud (Freehold Games, 2024)
Subgenre: Roguelike
Played: This past year
Memory of it: Fresh
DNF
I keep trying to like Roguelikes. I need to stop and accept that they aren’t for me.
The intricate, Dwarf Fortress-esque level of simulation is pretty cool. There was one part where I was on fire and I was like, can I go into the inventory and pour water on myself to put it out? And I did.
But on top of all of the nuance, of all those potential interactions, is a basic dungeon crawler where you’re doing the usual stuff you do in most any other roguelike – explore, find items, and attack things.
I really wanted to like this one. It’s an impressive achievement, especially for an indie endeavor, and I wish I saw in it what its proponents do. I've gone back and forth on whether or not to include it in on this list - among the DNFs I including on the list, this is the one I spent the least time with. Did I really play enough to pass judgment on it? Am I being too harsh on something that is probably really good but just not to my taste? I don't know. If you're the kind of person who plays these sorts of games, it's probably a good one, but if you think that this is the game that will sell you on Dwarf-Fortress-likes or roguelikes, then it probably isn't.
72) Rogue Legacy (Cellar Door Games, 2013)
Subgenre: Platformer roguelike
Played: Persistently, 12 years ago
Memory of it: Hazy
DNF
I keep trying to like Roguelikes. I need to stop and accept that they aren’t for me.
I think Rogue Legacy may have pioneered the mechanic that Hades is now known for where your character improves between runs through the dungeon. I don’t think I’m actually all that crazy about it. Do your decisions during your run matter, or are they all meaningless because your character is under-leveled and the long game is more important?
I poured 20 hours into it, which is a lot of time to repeat the same procedurally generated motifs, and felt like I wasn’t getting anywhere. I actually really enjoyed the game up until the point where I realized I was never going to beat it and all of my investment felt wasted.
71) Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (GBA) (Griptonite Games, 2002)
Subgenre: Hack-n-slash action RPG
Played: Repeatedly, 20-23 years ago
Memory of it: Hazy
It’s a Diablo-like for the Game Boy Advance. You chose between playing as Frodo, Gandalf, Aragorn, Legolas, or Eowyn at the start and play through the events of the first two films as that character. Having distinct campaigns for each of the characters was pretty cool.
Aragorn could throw repeatedly swords at dudes like he just had a cape of spare swords ready to go, so that was something.
I played it a lot as a kid because I was a kid and it was a game I owned. I must have liked it.
70) Valkyria Chronicles 3 (Media. Vision, 2011)
Subgenre: TRPG
Played: Within the past year
Memory of it: Fresh enough
DNF
I’ll talk more about the fantasy WWII tactical RPG series Valkyria Chronicles as a whole further on in the list when we talk about its vastly superior home console entries, but I feel like talking about the series’ strengths is wasted on VC3. A lot of people say that VC3 is secretly the best entry in the series, so when I replayed VC1 last year and followed up with VC4, I found a translation patch and a PSP emulator and gave it a go.
I’ll admit that VC3's story's premise is intriguing (you're in charge of a penal military unit), but the game itself gets real boring real fast. Instead of each battle having unique objectives and maps as they do in VC1 and 4, VC3 liberally reuses its cramped maps and features more generic scenarios. Media Vision definitely had their work cut out for them: translating the gameplay of the PS3 original to the dinky PSP is a difficult task, but it was always doomed to fail.
69) Pokemon Y (Game Freak, 2013)
Subgenre: Monster collecting JRPG
Played: 5-6 years ago
Memory of it: Fair
Pokemon X and Y is the only Pokemon game that I would say is just straight-up bad. I think everything I liked about X and Y – which mostly just amounts to the amount of fun I had with the character customization - was done better in the later 3D installments. Pokemon has never been known for its difficulty, but never has Pokemon’s accessibility undermined and cheapened the experience to this degree. I was so bored playing through these fights. I laughed out loud when the game gave me the evil death bird that fired nuclear death lasers at unsuspecting wildlife. I liked what the story set out to do but it absolutely failed in its execution. Lysandre may be my least favorite of Pokemon’s villains?
68) Pokemon FireRed (Game Freak, 2004)
Subgenre: Monster collecting JRPG
Played: Repeatedly, from 8-20 years ago
Memory of it: Fresh enough
I spent a lot of time working on an unreleseased ROM hack of this game, so I am very intimate with FireRed’s innards.
The first of Pokemon RBY’s remakes. Between the two versions of the Kanto region I have played through, I think this is the worse one. Pokemon’s first generation was defined by its idiosyncracies and expressive spritework, and polishing them away just erases its identity. And there are some changes (errors?) that are downright bizarre. The fact that Giovanni’s Rhydon, the ACE POKEMON of the FINAL GYM LEADER in the game, is inexplicably devolved into a Rhyhorn is, by itself, a serious blemish that immediately disqualifies FireRed and LeafGreen as the definitive versions of this game.
The only reason FireRed is this high on the list is because the game it’s based on is a total banger. But if you want to play gen I Pokemon… why not just play gen I Pokemon?
67) Fallout 3 (Bethesda, 2008)
Subgenre: Open world action RPG
Played: 12 years ago
Memory of it: Hazy
I remember having fun with this, which is more than I can say about Skyrim, but I think that was mostly because I was suffering from gender dysphoria and liked dressing up my gunslinger in 1950’s housewife dresses.
66) Sonny (Krin, 2007) and Sonny 2 (2008)
Subgenre: Turn-based RPG
Played: ~17 years ago
Memory of it: Bare
I was scratching my head thinking of any Flash RPGs I played when I was younger. The Flash games that I held in the most reverence were adventure games (Peasant’s Quest and the absolutely legendary Mata Nui Online Game). The first RPG I thought of was the aforementioned Digimon Adventure, but then I remembered the Sonny games.
You played as a zombie. Each game was a string of turn-based battles with cutscenes in between. I remember it being fun.
65) Digimon Survive (Hyde, 2022)
Subgenre: Visual novel TRPG
Played: Repeatedly, 3 years ago
Memory of it: Pretty good
“My throat hurts…”
This game could have been great.
Critics have referred to Survive as a “standout" visual novel with mediocre TRPG elements. I think that none of those critics have never played a good visual novel before.
The reason this game is as high as it is that I loved my first playthrough of Survive! It’s the same setup as the original Digimon Adventure anime – a group of kids very similar to the anime’s cast is teleported to another world and has to find their way home – except there’s some horror sprinkled in. The game is called Digimon Survive because, well, not all of the kids survive. For one of the few times in this franchise, the world of Digimon (sorry, world of Kemonogami) is appropriately lethal.
The visuals are killer. The writing itself is often good! The combat is basic but fun. Your Digimon’s evolution is shaped by the protagonist's personality, which is something that I’ve always wanted in a Digimon game! If you asked me for my dream Digimon game, it would have looked a lot like Survive!
So I played through the game the first time and had a great time, and if I had stopped there, the game would have placed in the top 25 on this list, easy. But the game practically begs you to play it repeatedly. All 4 routes are meaningfully different, you have to play through the game twice to get the true ending, and you have to play through it three times if you want to unlock all of Agumon’s evolutions. And it is during the second playthrough when the game’s cracks begin to show.
At the time, I remember thinking there were a number of ways in which the game didn’t hold up to scrutiny on repeated playthroughs, but the game’s biggest sin is in the lack of causality between what the player does and what happens next.
In three of the routes, there is a key point in the game in which the protagonist, Takuma, returns to the human world and the player has to select a motivation for him to return to the other world. The options are: “stay with Agumon” (his partner Digimon), “save the world,” or “save his friends.” The choice the player makes determines which character dies in the following scene and who the villain of the route is.
The problem here is that there is no cause and effect between Takuma’s motivation and everything that follows! You choose a motivation, Takuma returns to the other world, and a different tragedy happens irrespective of anything Takuma does or thinks! It feels less like the protagonist is making a choice with consequences and more like the player is choosing an ending from a DVD menu. The most important choice in the entire game has the weight of an empty whoopie cushion, and it absolutely shatters the immersion! Literally every other visual novel I’ve played, no matter how bad it was, was at least capable of drawing a causal line between what the player does and what happens next! The whole point of giving the player choice in visual novels – hell, in games at large – is that there are meaningful consequences to the player's actions! This is the most basic promise of video games as an artform, and Survive fucking blows it!
And then there’s the game’s absolute fumbling of the lesbian romantic subplot! Oh my god! Spoilers for one of the routes, I fucking guess!
So, in the game, there’s romantic tension between two of the girls, Aoi and Saki. It’s kinda weird that one of them is 15 and the other is 12 (they could’ve just made them 14 and 13 and it would have been fine!), but whatever, ignore that for now. The one route that most thoroughly explores the nature of their relationship, tragically enough, is the one where Saki dies and Aoi, accordingly, goes apeshit and becomes the big bad. And in isolation, that’s a fine storyline. Burying your gays is a tired trope but it isn't like it's off-limits.
But then there’s the “true” route where you get the unambiguously happy ending where everyone of import survives. The route that is objectively the best one. And in that one, the romantic tension shifts from being between the girls to being between one of the girls and Takuma – there’s a scene in this route only where whichever girl Takuma has the most favor with is flirty with him. And the romantic tension between the girls is now totally nonexistent.
And that’s what fucking stings. The worst ending in the game is the one where you bury your gays and your homosexual yearning nearly destroys the world. The happy ending for Aoi and Saki isn’t the one where they survive and end up together, it’s the one where they fall for the guy instead. I never thought a game’s structure could be this homophobic, but now I know better!
I can’t think of a game that has disappointed me more than Digimon Survive. Ugh! Still a better game than Next Order.
64) Final Fantasy XIII (Square Enix, 2009)
Subgenre: JRPG
Played: 10 years ago
Memory of it: Hazy
DNF
I really wanted to like this one. I enjoyed the visuals, combat system, and character design. “Blinded by Light” is one of the greatest RPG battle themes of all time and heavily influenced my score for Jailbird Nocturne. Lightning is the hottest video game character ever and I both want to be her and date her.
But it dragged on for too long. I stopped caring about the story at some point, and when I thought I was getting to the end, the game stopped being a series of hallways and finally allowed for open exploration, which, based on my experience of other Final Fantasies VII and VIII, signaled that I was at more of a mid-point than an end point (when I played FFX, XIII's structure finally made sense to me). The game took up a lot of space on my hard drive and it was kinda pissing me off, so I uninstalled it then and there.
Turns out I misread the signal and I was actually at the end of the game. I was so close.
63) Final Fantasy IX (Square, 2000)
Subgrenre: JRPG
Played: 2 years ago
Memory of it: Pretty good
DNF
Lynn, if you’re reading this, I’m sorry. A lot of people insist that FFIX is secretly one of the best ones, and I wish I got out of this game what they all did.
I played through most of it, got to the final boss, had my ass handed to me in 2 or 3 turns, and felt like it wasn’t worth the effort to grind and prepare to make it through the final stretch. The whole mechanic where player abilities are linked to equipment is neat, but it meant that, moreso than other entries in the series, player progression was linked to exploring the nooks and crannies of the game world and engaging with its optional systems, and one of my favorite things about the PS1 era of Final Fantasy games is that all of that side content is not only optional, but often straight-up hidden. I was shook when I made it to the end game and found that my Black Mage was useless because he still hadn’t learned Firaga because I didn’t find the right staff, and I got disheartened. I felt like I had played the game wrong.
I like what the game’s trying to do with its story. I think Vivi and Zidane’s subplots are really interesting, but Zidane’s whole deal felt rushed in at the very end, and most of the rest of the cast felt under-utilized, especially Freya, who was my favorite character mostly because she was a rat who was also a girl with a spear.
To its credit, I felt like the game otherwise exemplified a lot of what made the PS1 Final Fantasies so iconic. Like VII and VIII, FFIX is spectacular in the audiovisual departments.
62) Pokemon Ruby (Game Freak, 2002)
Subgenre: Monster collecting JRPG
Played: At least once, 23 years ago
Memory of it: Fair
Pokemon’s third generation of games was the last one I originally played as a child when they came out. I never revisited Gen III as an adult, and look forward to rectifying that one day. I mostly remember the third generation for sanitizing the character designs I had loved from the first two generations and permanently jacking up the series’ melodrama levels (this was more or less the first game where you have to save the world), but I certainly had fun with it is as a kid, and I’ve heard that it’s held up. I'd be curious to replay it and see how my impression changes 2 decades later.
61) Megaman Battle Network (Capcom, 2001)
Subgenre: TRPG
Played: 2-3 years ago
Memory of it: Pretty Good
The original MMBN feels more different from the rest of the series than any of the other entries. It laid a fantastic foundation for the games to follow, and I had a good enough time with it, but it was a game that was still trying to figure out what it was about. The bosses in particular feel weirdly simple and static compared to what would follow.
The best thing about MMBN is that it is the most tightly paced of the original games – the whole thing is all gas from start to finish. I think I could pinpoint the moment towards the end of MMBN2 where the devs figured out they could pad for time by making the player backtrack through the game world… which you spend a lot of time the rest of the series from that point onward doing. But MMBN1 is free of that.
60) Pokemon Platinum (Game Freak, 2008)
Subgenre: Monster collecting JRPG
Played: One and a half times, from 5-10 years ago
Memory of it: Hazy
I know saying that Gen IV of Pokemon is mid is a hot take. I understand why a lot of people hold it in high regard: DPP is the most refined of Pokemon’s first four generations. The series’ mechanics went through a rapid evolution in gens I-IV (Defense split! Held items! Breeding! Abilities! Double battles! Physical/special split!), but after gen IV, the series had stabilized.
It is because Gen IV is so essentially, purely “modern” Pokemon that it feels the most generic. The earlier gens had their own charm, mystique, and roughness, Gen V was defined by its stellar campaign, and the 3D games all have their unique gimmicks. But Gen IV felt to me like it was the Pokemon game that most lacked its own identity.
The Distortion World was very cool, and the Cynthia battle is iconic. I have nothing bad to say about it, but little else good to say about it either.
59) Pokemon Sword (Game Freak, 2019)
Subgenre: Monster-collecting JRPG
Played: ~2-4 years ago
Memory of it: Pretty good
I reviewed this game alongside Legends Arceus and Violet in 2024, so I will try not to be too redundant.
Given the controversy surrounding the graphical quality of the Switch Pokemon games and “Dexit,” I want to plant my flag in the ground and say that I liked this game for what it was! Now that I have more distance, I think now that the game world and story both fell flat, and I think it’s one of the franchises’ weaker entries. But I really liked camping, making curry, and taking pictures of my team. The sports stadium themed gym battles were spectacular and brought a smile to my face.
58) Jack Move (So Romantic, 2022)
Subgenre: Turn-based RPG
Played: 3 years ago
Memory of it: Hazy
Short cyberpunk indie RPG. I loved the art style, and the combat and customization was fun. The writing didn’t always land for me.
57 Child of Light (Ubisoft Montreal, 2014)
Subgenre: RPG with platforming
Played: 11 years ago
Memory of it: Bare
The art style was nice, and the combat system was cool.
56) Always Sometimes Monsters (Vagabond Dog, 2014)
Subgenre: …nonviolent CRPG? This one is hard to classify.
Played: 11 years ago
Memory of it: Bare
From what I remember, this is an indie game where you are traveling from place to place, trying to catch up with your love interest and win her back. The game takes place over 30 days, and you must manage your characters’ time carefully each day to complete the journey. It’s a fascinating premise that left an impression, even if the details are a little fuzzy!
The most I concretely remember is that I failed to win my beloved’s heart back, and when I did, control shifted over to her actual partner, and the entire “post-game” is just you masturbating in the shower over and over again. Helluva ending!
55) 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim (Vanillaware, 2019)
Subgenre: Visual novel TRPG
Played: 1-2 years ago
Memory of it: Fair
A gorgeous visual novel with an alluring premise: 13 teenagers in the 1980’s experience supernatural phenomena typical of pulp science fiction. Half of the game is spent charting through each of these characters’ stories visual-novel style as they figure out what is actually going on, while the other half fast-forwards to the present where each of them is, for some reason, piloting a mecha in an original and flashy TRPG battle system.
This was one of those games where the journey was better than the destination. I cannot emphasize enough how much I loved this game for most of its runtime as I unravelled the alluring mystery and got to know these kids. But then the mystery is solved, and the answer is less satisfying than any of the theories I had come up with along the way. It was a let down. It went from game of the year contender to middle-of-my-list with the snap of a finger.
54) Pokemon White 2 (Game Freak, 2012)
Subgenre: Monster-collecting JRPG
Played: Months ago
Memory of it: Fresh
A lot of folks insist that Pokemon Black and White 2 are secretly the best Pokemon games, and I understand why they say that. They’re definitely among the tougher ones – the only restriction I placed on myself during my playthrough was not to use items in-battle, and there were boss fights that took me multiple attempts and thoughtful preparation, which is a rarity for the franchise. The game also makes more frequent use of double, triple, and rotation battles over the course of its campaign than any other entry in the series. Pokemon’s core battle mechanics are really great, and it’s a shame that this is one of the only games that makes them sing!
I didn’t care as much for the story this time around, but it’s hard to top the original Black and White’s climax. In terms of narrative intensity, White 2 felt more like DLC than a sequel.
If you love Pokemon battles, then B2W2 is a must play, but it did leave me feeling a little cold. Like Kyurem. Haha.
53) Megaman Battle Network 5: Team Protoman/Team Colonel (Capcom, 2004)
Subgenre: TRPG
Played: Two and a half times, from 2-21 years ago
Memory of it: Pretty good
MMBN5: Team Protoman was the second of the two MMBNs I had played as a kid. I was never able to beat it back then – there was a minigame that required very precise inputs, and my Gameboy’s d-pad was broken at that point. So I was excited when I finally was able to beat it on my partner’s fully-functional GBA SP over 15 years later.
This is one of the worse written entries in the series, though I remember thinking the writing in Team Colonel (the canonical version) was better when I finally played it as part of my Legacy Collection run. The Liberation Battles – board-game like turn-based tactical battles unique to this entry – weren’t to everyone’s liking, but I found them satisfying, and however you feel about those reflects how you feel about BN5.
MMBN 5 is both narratively and mechanically a sequel to 4, but I think you can skip 4 and not miss anything. First time players should play Team Colonel.
52) Borderlands 2 (Gearbox, 2012)
Subgenre: Action FPS RPG
Played: Repeatedly, 7-13 years ago
Memory of it: Pretty good
Oh, shit, I forgot until now that Borderlands is as much an action RPG as it is a shooter.
Borderlands 1 and 2 were fun and certainly defined early gaming 2010’s for me. I played a lot of them both, mostly by myself, sometimes with friends, once with my shitty roommate. I remember during our playthrough of Borderlands 2, he said that if his daughter talked like Tina Tina, he’d slap her, which was one of many signs that we were fundamentally incompatible.
Did Borderlands 2 have a better story than the original? Sure. Was I playing Borderlands for the story? Naw.
51) Borderlands (Gearbox, 2009)
Subgenre: Action RPG FPS
Played: Repeatedly, 7-16 years ago
Memory of it: Pretty good
“Smells like… off-worlder!”
I’m placing the original Borderlands above 2 solely because I preferred the weapons in the first one, and the randomly generated guns are the whole point of Borderlands! It felt like the original game had more variety within each weapon type, and while there were more weapon types in 2, every weapon within each type felt same-y to me.
Beyond that, both Borderlands 1 and 2 were very good, very similar games that I was once obsessed with but now have no real desire to go back to.