Have 100 hours to burn? Want to get fully immersed in a game, while also knowing you can wander off to get some toast whenever you want? Well, friend, these are the turn-based RPGs that will completely take over your life. It’s no secret.
Atelier Ryza: Ever Darkness & The Secret Hideout
When you need a break from saving the world, there’s few better ways than with an Atelier game.
You play as an ordinary farm girl who longs for adventure. A chance encounter leads to her discovering her aptitude for alchemy, after which she and her friends embark on a variety of low-stakes adventures.
Now, you’ve probably seen or at least heard of a few slice-of-life fantasy anime at some point — but Atelier Ryza is your chance to play it and live it. While things do eventually get a bit more serious, this is predominantly a slow-paced, cozy RPG. The real-time turn-based combat evokes classic Final Fantasy’s ATB, and like any other Atelier game, you’ll find an incredibly robust and addictive alchemy system where your crafting chops will yield powerful gear to dominate the battlefield.
There’s no better time than now to settle down with Atelier Ryza, as the game has also just received a DX release that adds exclusive new content.
Baldur’s Gate 3
Larian’s 2023 magnum opus raised the bar for RPGs worldwide. Using the 5th edition of Dungeons and Dragons as a base, Baldur’s Gate 3 weaves an incredibly well-written story driven by a mind-boggling amount of player freedom.
You play as a character captured by mind flayers, and infected with a tadpole that will eventually transform them into a mind flayer themselves if not removed. How you approach the journey to find a cure is up to you, even if it means being an absolute bastard to everyone around you.
That player freedom also extends to the game’s complex yet compelling combat, which, in addition to your massive repertoire of skills and abilities, lets you make full use of the environment, whether it’s through tossing enemies off cliffs or blowing up entire encampments.
And unlike most games we’re covering today, it’s got co-op, so rather than pester your friends about how amazing this game is, you can bring them onboard and embark on the journey together. What a breath of fresh air.
Breath of Fire IV
Breath of Fire IV holds up as one of the most beloved PS1 RPGs, and it distinguishes itself from the rest of the genre with some interesting twists on the traditional JRPG formula. For instance, character customization in this game involves letting your party members become apprentices to masters found across the world. Through these mentors, your characters will get stat boosts and new skills by fulfilling various tasks.
Combat, meanwhile, features a back row system where you can swap characters in and out of combat. Fighters in reserve are unable to act, but regenerate HP and AP every turn. Using skills and abilities can also create combos, each with different effects.
Though the franchise as a whole continues to languish in obscurity, Breath of Fire IV did see a re-release on GOG, ensuring that newcomers and veterans alike can always return to this classic.
Chrono Trigger
This 1995 SNES masterpiece hardly needs an introduction. With industry legends like Hironobu Sakaguchi, Yuji Horii, and Akira Toriyama involved, Chrono Trigger had an incredibly talented team behind it, and the results speak for themselves.
This time traveling epic streamlines the formula that defined the SNES Final Fantasy games: turn-based ATB combat, a beautiful pixel art world that continues to stand the test of time, and an unforgettable story.
Where Chrono Trigger differs from its cousins is in just how snappy and fast-paced the game feels to play. Enemy encounters are seamless, the world map has no random encounters, and the game moves at a brisk pace with barely a wasted moment, clocking in at just about 20 hours for a full playthrough.
Not many RPGs can boast the same conciseness, but those who still crave more at least have multiple endings to see. It’s just too bad that the only sequel we got, while still good, is nothing like one of the SNES’s most beloved games, just to be clair.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
While turn-based RPGs are more popular than ever now, there’s a distinct lack of titles that feature more realistic character designs and AAA-esque visuals in a fantasy setting.
Sandfall Interactive’s goal of recapturing the vibes of games like Lost Odyssey was an admirable, yet daunting effort — and it didn’t help that Bethesda shadow dropped Oblivion Remastered a mere two days before Clair Obscur’s scheduled release.
As we all know by now, Clair Obscur defied the odds and took the world by storm. Stunning visuals, a haunting soundtrack, and top-notch voice acting helped the game’s story about grief and loss enrapture audiences. A traditional world map hearkens back to the glory days of the SNES and PS1, and turn-based fiends all got their fill with a combat system that incorporated dodges, parries, and enough flexibility in character customization to break the game wide open.
Clair Obscur’s rousing success has turned heads all across the industry, and it seems inevitably poised to go down as an all-timer that’s still fondly remembered decades later.
Dragon Quest VIII: Journey of the Cursed King
Dragon Quest has remained consistent and stalwart over the decades, but it’s still seen its share of change and evolution. Dragon Quest VIII marked the series’s transition to full 3D environments and character models. And while its predecessors had great stories in their own right, VIII’s addition of full voice acting gave everything a bit more cinematic flair.
Dragon Quest VIII’s character building also deviates a bit from past entries. Where VI and VII had vocations systems to fully customize your team, VIII gives you a party with predefined roles, and a skill point system that gives you some wiggle room in their weapons and abilities.
Other presentational flourishes have helped the game remain as charming today as it was in 2004; it was the first entry in the series to feature full orchestral music, and also the first to follow a new standard of localization that would define the series in the years since its debut. Dragon Quest VIII is a high water mark of the series, and the next game you should play if you’re looking for something similar to the likewise excellent Dragon Quest XI. You’re bound to like this next one.
EarthBound
Over 30 years later, EarthBound remains one of Nintendo’s most beloved games. Gamers who were accustomed to fantasy RPGs in this era had their hearts captured by EarthBound’s then-unique urban Americana inspired setting. On your journey to fend off Giygas’s alien invasion, you’ll fight a wide variety of eccentric enemies, from corrupt cops, to zombies and even living piles of vomit.
If you’re familiar with how RPGs work, you’ll have no trouble getting into EarthBound. Shigesato Itoi’s masterpiece does have a twist up its sleeve, though: characters’ HP is rendered like an odometer in battle, and rolls down when hit. Should a character take a mortal blow, they won’t actually be KO’d until their HP completely rolls down to 0, giving you precious time to use healing PSI on them.
Though there are many imitators and homages today, EarthBound’s atmosphere still feels distinct, with a charming story that still holds up today. The only problem: when are we getting Mother 3 in the west, Nintendo?
Fallout 2
While Fallout today is seen as — somewhat reductively — Skyrim with guns, the series was turn-based once upon a time.
The year is 2241. Your story begins in the village of Arroyo, suffering from a record-breaking drought. The elder names you the Chosen One, and sends you off on a quest to retrieve a G.E.C.K., an item thought to be able to change the wasteland into a paradise.
While the main story has its own linear progression and ending, what you do in the world from there is largely up to you. As you’d expect from an RPG like this there are tons of side quests to encounter, and compared to Bethesda’s efforts, your choices in Fallout 2 have heavier consequences on the world. Battles, meanwhile, use an action point system where you can attack, move, or use items as long as you have points left.
Fallout 2 is definitely showing its age today, but it still remains a beloved classic — one that at least a few diehards would argue is better than nearly everything that came after. Objectively better than 76 though, that was Terrable.
Final Fantasy VI
Look, we all know how amazing Final Fantasy VI is. So how about this — did you know that its second half in the World of Ruin wasn’t initially planned? It came about because development was coming along smoothly enough to allow for extra time to implement the concept.
The end result is fondly remembered for a reason. With dark and mature themes underpinned by a current of hope, Final Fantasy VI was ahead of its time. The use of an ensemble cast also allowed for a level of non-linearity in tackling character episodes and rebuilding the scattered party in the second half.
Meanwhile, the fundamentals of combat and character customization of IV and V were refined and given an extra twist: party members can equip magicite to learn abilities and gain stat bonuses on leveling up.
It’s all brought together by a timeless soundtrack and visuals that have stood the test of time — Final Fantasy VI should be your next stop if you’ve yet to play it in any form.
Live A Live
Before there was Octopath Traveler, there was Live A Live for the Super Famicom. Both are turn-based RPGs built around standalone vignettes. But while Octopath gave players an overworld to explore and a party to form at their leisure, Live A Live’s stories are separated by era.
You’ll explore wildly diverse settings with distinctive gameplay gimmicks, from ancient China to a spaceship in the distant future. It’s all brought together by a simple turn-based battle system where characters and enemies can move about on a 7×7 grid. There’s no MP system to limit what you can use, but some skills take time to charge up.
Though not as well known as Square’s other RPGs, Live A Live has quite a legacy behind it. Its banger soundtrack was Yoko Shimomura’s first major work at Square — and one of those tracks, Megalomania, would eventually inspire Undertale’s Megalovania. Its director Takashi Tokita, meanwhile, would eventually direct Chrono Trigger.
Despite being trapped in Japan for decades, the game would finally live another life when a remake brought it west to a much wider audience. Make sure this one isn’t lost from your library.
Lost Odyssey
This Xbox 360 exclusive, often seen as the Final Fantasy XIII that never was, featured the involvement of Hironobu Sakaguchi, father of Final Fantasy, and Nobuo Uematsu, Final Fantasy’s most iconic composer.
Lost Odyssey tells the tale of a group of amnesiac immortals who find themselves struggling against one man’s attempts to manipulate his way into world domination. Though a solid story all-around, Lost Odyssey’s best writing is found in A Thousand Years of Dreams — memories of the protagonist that are presented as text-based short stories.
Lost Odyssey features traditional turn-based battles with some interesting twists. Mortal characters learn new skills by leveling up, but immortals need to equip accessories or link up with their mortal companions to learn those abilities. A simple timed button press system adds engagement to combat, but otherwise, this is the turn-based Final Fantasy game that fans wish Square Enix would complete.
Lunar Silver Star Story Complete
Lunar: Silver Star Story has it all: adventure, romance, and classic turn-based battles.
Our story begins in Burg, with protagonist Alex dreaming of becoming a legendary Dragonmaster. After his friend Ramus convinces Alex to join him on a trip to the local cave, Alex is given the chance to make that dream come true by the dragon living within. What ensues is a simple yet classic JRPG story of love triumphing over evil.
The turn-based battles are pretty simple stuff; your party has their typical attacks, skills, and magic, and a basic positioning system adds a minor level of strategy on top.
Where Lunar really shines is in its writing. Though such localization changes wouldn’t fly today, publisher Working Designs went through great lengths to spice up the script, adding in irreverent humor and pop culture references. This, combined with the game’s heavy use of anime cutscenes, made for an experience that was incredible for its time.
Octopath Traveler II
Octopath Traveler presents an interesting premise: pick one of eight characters to start, journey across the continent, recruit the others, and experience everyone’s stories in a mostly non-linear fashion. JRPG parties often feature people from wildly different walks of life, but Octopath’s structure emphasizes this fact, making character interactions all the more fascinating.
Unfortunately, it was marred by design choices that stopped all but the most dedicated players from seeing many of those interactions, and its true ending was ruined by the core cast’s complete lack of reaction to seeing the story’s lore culminate in major revelations.
Octopath Traveler II, on the other hand, was everything the first game should have been. The turn-based combat, which emphasizes hitting enemy weaknesses to stun them, and saving up BP to power up your skills, is as fantastic as ever. But the real star of the show is the much improved story, with more interesting vignettes, an improved finale, and extra stories that spotlight character pairs.
Thanks to these improvements, Octopath Traveler II stands as Square’s best HD-2D game — and perhaps one of the best in their whole history. Maybe for the next thousand years.
Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door
In the decades since its release, Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door has never been bettered. Its grand adventure to gather the Crystal Stars boasts some of the most charming writing in the subseries, while the gameplay refined the turn-based battles of the original Paper Mario.
As with the original title, Mario is accompanied by one of several potential partners, and the pair have a wide arsenal of moves to take on all challengers while dazzling the audience. New to Thousand Year Door was the fact that crowds would gather to watch every single one of your fights.
The more you please the audience by succeeding in timed button presses, the faster your Star Power will refill, letting you use the power of the Crystal Stars to further turn the tide of battle. But some of these viewers are also unruly, interfering in fights by tossing stuff at the stage or messing with stage props.
Despite the incredible legacy that Thousand Year Door left behind, its sequels sadly never even attempted to recapture the same magic, as all of them gradually stripped away Paper Mario’s RPG identity.
Persona 5
This masterpiece sees a group of socially outcast teenagers gain the power to enter peoples’ minds — so they adopt the role of Phantom Thieves who steal treasure, to change their targets’ cognition and force them to reckon with their many crimes. Eight years on, Persona 5’s vigilante tale remains as relevant and cathartic as ever.
Rather than reinvent the wheel, Persona 5 polished the formula to one of the finest sheens in Atlus’s entire catalogue. You’ll still be going to school, forming relationships with people around town, and then using those bonds for dungeon crawling, but you’ll be doing it in style with some of the best UI and presentation in all of gaming.
And these dungeons — or Palaces — are also some of Atlus’s best. While a randomly generated labyrinth is still present, the bulk of the places you’ll infiltrate are hand-crafted, complete with puzzles and stealth sequences.
An updated re-release, Persona 5 Royal, sweetens the deal by adding in an extra arc and dungeon, as well as tons of quality of life changes. It’s absolute gold.
Pokémon HeartGold & SoulSilver
These remakes of Pokémon Gold & Silver stand tall today as the most polished and feature-complete Pokémon games.
Owing to their status as the second mainline Pokémon games ever released, Gold & Silver were home to a number of unusual quirks — such as the inclusion of Kanto as post-game content. This, and other fan favorite mechanics over the years, were not only faithfully recreated here, but expanded upon, making HeartGold & SoulSilver some of the most content-packed Pokémon games.
You’ve got all 493 Pokémon to date available here, and areas in Kanto that had to be slimmed down in the originals are present in these remakes in their full glory. Plus, these games would mark the final appearance of the beloved Battle Frontier post-game area.
It’s all the more unfortunate, then, that Nintendo, The Pokémon Company, and GameFreak haven’t made a habit of re-releasing older Pokémon games on newer systems — especially given that the modern games have set the fanbase on fire for all the wrong reasons.
Suikoden II
Suikoden was a fantastic turn-based RPG with a unique premise — in your journey to liberate your home country from tyranny, you’ll recruit 108 Stars of Destiny, people who are fated to leave an impact on history. Many of these characters add essential features to your home base, and a huge chunk are even playable in battle.
While Suikoden’s plot still holds up well today, it walked so its sequel could run. Suikoden II expanded just about everything — its darker story featured more mature themes, its main antagonist is one of the genre’s most memorable, and the rest of the main cast are significantly more developed.
Suikoden II’s combat still holds up well, with fast and snappy battles despite having you field up to six characters to make a team. Characters can be placed in the front or back rows, with their personal ranges dictating what enemies they can attack. A rune system lets you customize the party’s magic.
With the release of the remaster earlier this year, Suikoden has seen a resurgence — there’s no better time to play than now.
Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter
For 21 years, Nihon Falcom has been weaving something truly special in their corner of the JRPG world. The Trails series, now at 13 entries, tells a vast and interconnected story filled with dozens of characters spread out across four different countries, enriched by some of the best worldbuilding out there.
This year’s Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter, a remake of the very first game in the series, marks the new best starting point for newcomers on this incredible journey. As in the original, this remake stars Estelle and Joshua, a pair of siblings who join the Bracer Guild, an organization dedicated to protecting civilians, be it through killing monsters or taking on a variety of requests.
Though still a slow burn like its source material, Sky 1st Chapter’s complete combat overhaul works wonders in making the game more exciting for newcomers. In addition to the absolutely cracking turn-based battles, a simple action RPG combat system lets players gain the advantage on enemies before entering turn-based mode.
With its direct sequel also being confirmed for a full remake, Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter is the best time and place to start your Trails journey.
Xenogears
Originally pitched as a concept for Final Fantasy VII, Xenogears became its own sprawling RPG whose legacy can still be felt decades after its lead creatives left Squaresoft.
Xenogears starts like your stereotypical JRPG, with amnesiac protagonist Fei Fong Wong living in a peaceful village that’s quickly burned down. But that’s where the clichés end, as the rest of the game is an unbelievably complex dive into ancient conspiracies, character psychology, and heavy philosophical and religious symbolism.
This was a story ahead of its time, and one almost too ambitious, as its second half was infamously streamlined into a bunch of lengthy cutscenes and exposition dumps to meet deadlines and budget constraints.
Still, when you’re actually playing it, it’s a great time. Xenogears’s combat system features light, medium, and heavy attacks, and stringing them together forms flashy combos called Deathblows. Frequent sections with giant mechs also add fuel management to the equation.
Though showing its age compared to Tetsuya Takahashi’s later works, Xenogears has a boldness to its themes and narrative concepts that few games today dare to emulate.
Yakuza: Like a Dragon
It’s not often that a franchise abruptly and completely shifts genres with a new entry. And it’s even rarer to see an official proof of concept for that shift in an April Fool’s Day video, of all things. But that’s exactly what happened with Yakuza: Like a Dragon, the seventh mainline entry in the series, and the first to star new protagonist Ichiban Kasuga.
Yakuza: Like a Dragon’s gameplay is a fusion of the series’s city exploration and classic turn-based combat. Characters all have a variety of jobs, each with their own over-the-top skills that embody the franchise’s wackiness. Positioning is also a major factor in battles, as characters move about the battlefield on their own, and will use environmental objects to attack enemies if possible.
Though a bit slow to start, and bogged down by a couple of major difficulty spikes later in the story, Yakuza: Like a Dragon marked an incredibly successful transition in what is now one of Sega’s powerhouse franchises.
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