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, Quake 1-3, Jedi Outcast, Star Wars Battlefront, Half-Life 2, Team Fortress 2, Borderlands, Sauerbraten, and 8-Bit Killer 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.
Someone I knew 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 did not like 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” per se, but given that those subgenres are designed for indefinite play, 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, and Deus Ex: Human Revolution), games that I respected but didn’t vibe with (Dark Souls, Hades, Final Fantasy VI, Torchlight II, and Earthbound), 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
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. I’m trying my best to rank these games from worst to best, not least favorite to most favorite.
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 is hazy, take it with a grain of salt.
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.
Without further ado, let's get into the list!
84) Digimon World: Next Order (BB Studio, 2016)
Subgenre: Virtual pet JRPG
Played: 1-2 years 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, as it was, was a polarizing game. 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. When you strip that care away, you are stuck with a dull, soulless, cringe-inducing time-sink.
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 a 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 World 3 (BEC, 2002)
Subgenre: Turn-based JRPG
Played: Twice, ~5 and 15 years ago
Memory of it: Fair
DNF