1000 rpg games

The best RPGs embrace a rich storytelling tradition as well as deep and engaging gameplay to create universes that are as exciting to explore as they are thrilling to quest and do battle in.

But which RPGs are the best of the best? Which RPGs were influential enough to lead the rest, or bold enough to question the mold in new and exciting ways? Featuring a gorgeous open world, populated with fantasy creatures and real-life players alike, it gave gamers an expansive chunk of real estate to explore for days, months, and years on end. And once you reached the level cap, you could roll a new kind of character with a different play style to tide yourself over until the next expansion arrived.

The MMO genre eventually evolved and branched off in many directions, leaving EverQuest feeling rooted in the past. The final game, Wizardry 8, launched 20 years later. It mixes sci-fi trappings with traditional fantasy fare, so you have a smattering of guns and aliens alongside swords and spells. One of the best things about Wizardry 8 is its robust character creation tools. You can choose among 11 different races, ranging from Humans and Elves to Faeries, Mooks, and Hobbits.

Layer on a choice of 15 classes, and you end up with a stunning number of combinations to try in your party. Unlike The Elder Scrolls, which offers similar character options, Wizardry 8 lets you customize six party members instead of just one. Titan Quest is often shrugged off as just another Diablo clone. Instead of a well-trodden fantasy setting, Titan Quest looks to myths for inspiration.

To that end, it has you travel across China, Egypt, and Greece, slaying beasts likes centaurs and gorgons, while collecting ever more powerful gear. The gameplay is highly customizable, thanks to its deep class and mastering systems, which provide plenty of replay value for anyone looking to try different combat styles. And when you finish the game, you can make your very own campaign, thanks to a robust level editor.

Combat feels like a fluid dance, thanks to the melee, magic, and ranged attacks you can string together with ease. To top it off, the whole thing is rife with humor and charm. So whether you want to amass a real estate empire or simply woo a spouse, you can. When done right, dungeon crawlers create a sense of momentum as you hack through monsters, pick up the loot they drop, equip any high-level gear, and move on to do it again. This is a gameplay loop Torchlight II completely nails.

The four character classes are stocked with skills that are satisfying to use, the environments pulse with color, and playing co-op with friends makes it even more of a chaotic joy to play. The craving for loot is real, and Torchlight II delivers it in the best way. Pillars of Eternity excels on any number of fronts, but its dialog and vocal performances are among its strongest suits. And many of those hours are spent chatting with a variety of compelling characters.

Then again, it could backfire, leaving you worse off than before. Your path is determined early on by a seemingly innocuous decision. But what really sets Front Mission 3 apart is its mech-building mechanic. Every enemy mech you take down goes into your inventory, and you can swap parts around to create the patchwork mech of your dreams. To begin, you can customize up to six adventurers, with professions like warrior, rogue, hunter, and magician. True to the title, the bard is probably the most useful, because his songs cast spells that help out your entire party.

Set in the world of the Riftwar novels by Raymond E. You control three adventurers as you make your way through nine chapters of a fantasy story, fighting enemies, picking locks, maintaining degradable gear, and solving riddles to open Moredhel wordlock chests. Combat plays out like a turn-based strategy game, with combatants moving around on a grid to deliver strategic strikes.

Make sure you bring your reading glasses, because Krondor is dense with text, which should come as no surprise considering its literary origins. Most RPGs center around adventurers in a fantasy world. Freedom Force, on the other hand, is about superheroes in a modern setting. Perhaps the most interesting thing about this game is the combat. Each of your four heroes has unique moves, but they can also interact with the urban environment.

Parked cars can be hoisted and hurled at enemies. Light posts can be pulled out of the ground and swung like baseball bats. And while the combat takes place in real time by default, you can pause at any time to issue instructions to your party. Freedom Force is a stylish game that oozes charm and originality at every turn. And it is, but Larian Studios has modernized more than just the graphics.

Every location is brimming with creative ideas and new things to find, making it a real challenge to stop playing. All of this, and it also manages to be funny throughout.

Its story, about closing a breach in the fabric of the world, is about as epic as single-player games get.

And its character creation options are nearly limitless. But its most impressive achievement, and the reason players keep coming back to it, is the characters. Inquisition is stocked with sharply written, well acted characters that come to feel like good friends by the time the game is over.

Any game that can deliver that kind of experience is worth playing at least once. Darkest Dungeon wastes no time plunging players into a mood of doom and gloom. You control a party of adventurers who trudge into the depths of a dungeon, taking on enemies in turn-based battles as you go. Randomness plays a large role in the game, so you can never settle into a comfortable rhythm.

The class system is nicely varied, making it rewarding to try different party combinations. Each character has a unique set of moves, some of which need to be unlocked and all of which can be upgraded. For a game that might look simple on the outside, these overlapping systems add a great deal of complexity.

And with the difficulty level so high, winning always feels rewarding. The games center around Adol Christin, a redheaded hero on a quest to collect the books of Ys and takes on the evil forces rampaging through the world. With splashy real-time combat and eye-catching anime cut scenes, this collection helped prove that CD was the gaming medium of the future. Kingdom Hearts 2 considerably ups the combat possibilities of its predecessor, introducing new forms — and snazzy new suits — for Sora to wear.

The addition of the Reaction Command in combat also spices battles up, making for a combat experience made even more varied by the addition of the new Nobodies enemies. By streamlining some of the first Kingdom Heart's systems, including magic and the awful Gummi Ship levels — not to mention deepening the lore to stranger, more engaging depths — the first numbered sequel in the 15 year old franchise is still one of its strongest and one of the most fun to play.

Create another classic, of course. Rather than rehashing ideas from Chrono Trigger, Square decided to mix things up quite a bit with the sequel. Chrono Cross takes place in an entirely different world and stars a new set of characters.

But what really sets it apart is its unique battle system, which cleverly mixes turn-based tropes with real-time elements. Your characters have stamina meters that fill up between attacks. The longer you wait to make a move, the more powerful the move will be. The callbacks to Chrono Trigger are just icing on an already impressive cake.

Some people like short games: get in, have fun, and move on. Dragon Warrior VII is not for those people. This endlessly charming RPG is so packed with quests and breezy conversations that you can play it for well over hours without ever running out of things to do. Not only did the first game offer one of the most ambitious adventures available on the NES at the time, but it also spawned a series that now comprises dozens of sequels and spinoffs.

With its relatively robust class system, its four-character party, and steady injection of new gameplay ideas throughout the adventure, Final Fantasy helped cement a whole host of RPG tropes that would remain for decades to come.

Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss has it beat by over 20 years. In this pioneering first-person RPG, you explore a sprawling dungeon using free movement rather than the grid-based system that was common at the time.

You can gather useful items, pick your responses during conversations, and power up your character in a staggering number of ways.

As you explore the ruins, the music shifts on the fly to match whatever tone your adventuring takes on. This long-running MMO contains thousands of star systems you can explore at your leisure unless space pirates show up and blast you to oblivion. It presents players with a universe to explore and a basic set of gameplay systems. What you do with that is up to you, thanks to open-ended gameplay that rewards creativity and collaboration.

You can join up with other players and take part in multi-day space battles, or you can go off and mine resources to sell for a profit at the next space station. If you want to blow tens of thousands of real-life dollars building a city-sized space ship, you can do that too. The universe is your oyster. The story is shot through with humor that plays out in the script, but also in the many expressive character animations packed into the game. It tells the story of Claude and Rena, unlikely companions who come from very different backgrounds.

Claude is a spacefaring adventurer who accidentally transports himself to Expel, a faraway planet of magic and fantasy, where he meets Rena, who thinks he must be a legendary Hero of Light.

On top of that promising setup, the game is rife with intricate systems, all of which offer unique charms. An item creation mode lets you break down collectibles into food and gear. During real-time battles, you can control whichever party member you want, hopping between them to take advantage of their unique abilities. The graphics hold up well, with a dynamic battle camera, pre-rendered backgrounds, and expressive sprite-based characters.

When the spirit of the earth asks you to do something, you do it. For one thing, it shoehorns shooter mechanics into a turn-based strategy game. But somehow Sega took these seemingly incongruous ingredients and cooked up a truly impressive game. The battles are tactical but intense, thanks to a perspective that lets you plot your moves from an overhead view of the battlefield before swooping down and giving you direct control of your troops as you put your plan into action.

The characters are well written, and the game actually seems to have something to say about war. So while it mostly ditches side quests and puzzles that were common in its predecessors, it zeroes in on deep character creation tools and tons of combat variety. You start out by creating a party of up to six adventurers, selecting their class, gender, and race.

It presents you with mummies, skeletons, bugbears, orcs, goblins, giants, and a whole mess of other fantasy beasts to slay. In , Icewind Dale II was the perfect chaser to its sprawling, meditative predecessors. It even holds up today. Following an orphaned adventurer investigating relics called Silver Shards, NW2 improved on the first game in marked ways, especially in its narrative.

More importantly, it featured online co-op and a development toolset with which players could create their own scenarios for the game, both of which helped ensure Neverwinter Nights 2 would have an avid following to this day.

It built on everything fans love about the series, from its strategic turn-based battles to its focus on story and characters. Sometimes all a game needs is a second chance, and Odin Sphere got one with Odin Sphere Leifthrasir in Toby Fox wrote and designed, developed, composed the music for, and released Undertale solo, his only help from additional artists. And it took the gaming world by storm, largely thanks to its deceptively simple story and combat systems, which worked together to conceal great narrative depth.

Undertale turns nearly every RPG trope in existence on its head, while simultaneously feeling good as an RPG — a truly incredible feat. Ni no Kuni: Wratch of the White Witch follows the adventures of Oliver and his companions, who include an oddball fairy named Drippy, as Oliver tries to save his mother. Its unique combat system paired well with a Pokemon-like creature collection element, while its world brimmed with fantastic sights and sounds.

It even let players export their characters into later games in the series, another precursor of things to come. Dragon Quest VIII is considered by many fans to be among the best entries in the series, which is saying something for a franchise this popular.

This was back in the height of cartoonish, cel-shaded graphics, but even then this game stood out for its gorgeously rendered world. It also managed to be less complex than some of its predecessors, eschewing a complicated job system, which many players — weary of convoluted systems in contemporary RPGs — found refreshing. In an era when many of the most popular games, including all the best Super Nintendo games, were still telling their entire stories through text boxes, Lunar: Eternal Blue was ahead of its time with not just all those cutscenes but over an hour of voiced dialogue, all thanks to the Sega CD format.

It eschewed the turn-based combat of the previous games in favor of more action-oriented gameplay, and more importantly its impressive network features let players from all over the world connect and play with each other, with innovative communication options including unique emoji and other symbols. It also featured voice acting for the first time in the series, not to mention being remembered for its jazzy soundtrack by composers Yoshino Aoki and Akari Kaida.

It was also renowned for its animated scenes and stellar localization, and launched a sequel and multiple additional remakes. A relatively complex class system and extensive backgrounds for each character helped make the game distinct, while its grid-based combat system made Shining Force II ahead of its time.

With fantastic graphics, a deep turn-based combat system, and puzzle-based gameplay that pushed the boundaries of what RPGs could do outside of combat, Golden Sun was a landmark. And the fact that it was all on the tiny Game Boy Advance was even more to its credit.

A large part of that was its lack of random battles in dungeons, a huge advancement that made Lufia II way ahead of its time. It even had a randomly generated dungeon, the floor Ancient Cave, another feature of modern games that had yet to reach prominence at that time. Those elements combined with devious puzzles and an engrossing plot, earn Lufia II a spot on the list.

Following Yuri Lowell and his guild Brave Vesperia, Tales of Vesperia also featured an engrossing story involving abuse of Blastia energy that threatens the very planet. But the original will always be remembered for its impressive at the time! As a sequel to the original Shadow Hearts set in the chaos of the first world war, Shadow Hearts: Covenant is one of the best alternate-history RPGs out there.

The unique Judgment Ring made combat exciting, while new additions to the series like the Crest Magic system provided significant advancements over the original. Some wonky localization and dialogue issues only added to its charm. It was even criticized on its original release for its outdated graphics. Thanks to an involved combat and magic system, a solid story set 1, years after Phantasy Star II, and themes dealing with global climate catastrophe, it remains more than relevant today.

Practically every one of its characters has become an iconic hero or villain, and its legacy is immeasurable.

Stardew Valley captured hearts by feeling like a throwback to a simpler time in gaming, combining all the best bits of classic home-and-hearth games like Harvest Moon and Animal Crossing.

It singlehandedly breathed new life into the genre with its polished presentation, deep farming systems, and remarkable freedom. At heart, Persona 5 is a game about shaking off the chains of contemporary society.

Oh, sure, it's got some exciting turn-based combat, too, but nothing else about it leaves a mark on your soul quite like its leaps from hobnobbing around a Tokyo high school to venturing inside the dungeons of wayward adults and physically battling their personal demons. There's so much here, whether it's dungeons with hidden rooms or branching paths, or weighty modern themes centering on suicide and drug use. Its intimate explorations of multiple characters also make it an intensely personal story, and one that shouldn't be missed.

JRPGs were in a bit of a funk at the beginning of this decade, but few games sent them surging back to relevance quite like Xenoblade Chronicles. There's just so much to love about it, whether it's the sprawling open world with its many surprises to discover, the likeable cast of characters, the thrilling action combat, or a day and night cycle that caused enemies to grow stronger after the sun went down.

Toss in the stellar soundtrack, and that's a recipe for a game that should be popular for years to come. BioWare first made its name with fantasy RPGs, and Dragon Age: Origins marked a generally triumphant update to its tradition of pause-based combat mechanics and party micromanagement. But its chief strength was its grim setting in a dark fantasy world that married the high fantasy of The Lord of the Rings with the low fantasy of A Song of Ice and Fire, where elves are treated like trash and magic brought with it terrible prices.

It's also a character-driven game in true BioWare fashion, with the standout performance coming from Claudia Black as the role of the witch Morrigan. One of the most appealing aspects of Persona 3 is the way it jumps between what passes through the real world and fantasy, and it pulls it off while being effortlessly cool. The narrative follows a high school student whose extracurricular activities partly involve fighting creatures that gnaw on human minds during the "Dark Hour," and he's surrounding by memorable characters who aid him in this task.

Its greatest legacy, though, is the first appearance of the Social Links system, which lets the player level personas the manifestation of one's inner self while doing normal-world activities as well as by fighting monsters. Grandia II was one of the Sega Dreamcast's standout RPGs, delivering fantastic graphics for the system and the time and a good, twisty tale about a world still suffering from the effects of a battle between two gods from thousands of years ago.

The battle system was the chief standout, though, as it took the familiar JRPG turn-based formula and rejuvenated it by allowing characters to run behind their opponents or fall back after attacking them. And the rockin' battle anthem with its screaming electric guitars playing over this? That was the grandest part. From dozens of puzzle-focused shrines, chances to experiment with a robust physics system, or tough but rewarding combat, few games reward exploration like Breath of the Wild.

Even years on from launch, players are finding fresh ways to play in this version of Hyrule. It might not be the quantum leap forward many were hoping for, but like its protagonists, the franchise is edging closer to being the best there ever was with every instalment. Able to be played as both a relative newcomer and a hardened veteran of the series, Three Houses does away with characters found in earlier iterations and instead brings in a vast new cast.

Ready for punishment? Dark Souls III is the latest game in the series that wants to make you cry. This is a new kind of grind. It's not really about levelling-up your character, but a sort of mind-grind where you need to learn environments and enemy attack patterns to survive. It's like games from the old days, but those unflinching tangy bits are poured into a modern action role-player. As well as choosing a class, your weapons have class-related skills that are a key part of getting ahead in Dark Souls III.

It's not just about carefully-timed thwacks anymore. This game requires a certain mood, but for all its grim-ness, it's frequently totally beautiful too. If you want an RPG but have had quite enough of all the swords and sorcery nonsense, Fallout 4 needs to be on your to-buy list.

As any Fallout fan will know, the game is set in a nuclear apocalypse, where every puddle of water pumps radiation into your skin and even the cockroaches are deadly. This time around, you wake up from cryostasis in one of the bunker Vaults to find your spouse killed and your son kidnapped. You have to find him, even though he was taken 20 years before you wake up. Throw in some great quest writing and the ability to design your own little towns, and you have a bit of a role-playing winner.

As with Skyrim, there is also Fallout 4 VR for people who have a virtual reality headset. It took about five minutes post-release for Undertale to be called a cult classic. It's a story-driven role-player with a JPRG edge, but how it approaches its battles and its work is quite different from the norm. In Undertale, combat can be non-violent. It's what you want most of the time, because you'll feel awful for hurting the game's 'enemies'. Even how you fight isn't normal. Fights take place as a bullet hell arcade-style game that plays out as your character and the enemy talk.

It's an RPG that prods your emotions. It might even make you cry. We've been spoilt with ultra-high quality RPGs over the last few years. Dragon Age Inquisition is where to head if you find the Witcher 3 that bit too brooding and serious. You fight the evil forces that threaten the land of the free people.

You will fight undead and dragons, daemons and dark elves, orcs and evil cults. And eventually you will fail and die. New heroes will take the place of the old ones and fight against the enemy your old heroes where not able to defeat. You will learn more and more about the enemy you are facing and in the end you will overcome the evil you are facing. Pop Justice June 22nd, Pop Justice is a superhero game that takes place just a commercial break into the future. SuperSpeed Super Hero Roleplaying August 15th, Most super hero roleplaying games have a huge amount of overhead with rules and math bogging down the super hero action.

Wanderlust May 12th, A game about traveling a mystic land; where magic and spirits are everywhere. The whole rules are 6 pages long counting pictures and character sheets. Modos Roleplaying Game March 2nd, Game masters, player-characters, my friends! This game we play for: Character design that begins with character concept, not numbers! Direct rewards for good roleplaying! Abstract combat positions for your imagination, not the tabletop! Action-based combat instead of turn-based combat!

Streamlined rules, great for adding house rules or rules modules! On-the-fly GM features like one-second-monsters and the average-person rule! Many more cool features that let you roleplay the game you want! Have fun! Just Another Day January 12th, Submitted as part of a Two Page Tabletop contest, this two page tabletop RPG, explores life in the cyberpunk with lighter, flexible rules that encourage the player to push their luck and make sacrifices to succeed in the mission.

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