Best RPGs of all time

Elden Ring▲ Rising

FromSoftware took Dark Souls' bleak intimacy and cracked it open into a sprawling, horse-riding open world designed with Miyazaki and George R.R. Martin, and the result was a genre earthquake that made 'open-world design' mean something again. Malenia alone has generated more collective screaming than most entire games, and the Game of the Year sweep it earned in 2022 wasn't hype, it was consensus.

Year: 2022Critic score: 9.6/10

added by IJRin 13 rankings

Persona 5 Royal▲ Rising

Stealing hearts as stylish demon-summoning delinquents in Tokyo, the Phantom Thieves turned a JRPG into a fashion statement, with UI design so sharp it became its own meme genre. Royal's extra semester and Kasumi/Maruki arc took an already-complete game and made the definitive version, proving social-sim-meets-dungeon-crawler could still feel fresh a decade after Persona 3 invented the formula.

Year: 2020Critic score: 9.5/10

added by IJRin 4 rankings

Mass Effect 2▲ Rising

BioWare took the beloved but clunky original and rebuilt it around a suicide mission where your entire crew, painstakingly recruited and loyalty-missioned, could actually die based on choices you made hours earlier. It's the rare sequel that fixed everything wrong with its predecessor while making the character writing so good that Mordin's sacrifice still wrecks people a decade later.

Year: 2010Critic score: 9.5/10

added by IJRin 8 rankings

Baldur's Gate 3▲ Rising

Larian proved that a game can let you seduce a druid, turn into a bear mid-combat, and shove a goblin off a cliff with Telekinesis, all while telling a story with the narrative weight of a great Bioware epic — and somehow ship it without compromise. It didn't just revive isometric CRPGs, it made 'can I do that?' the default expectation for the entire genre going forward.

Year: 2023Critic score: 9.6/10

added by IJRin 8 rankings

Skyrim▲ Rising

Bethesda handed players a frozen, dragon-shouting sandbox and got out of the way, letting a decade of memes, mods, and 'arrow to the knee' jokes turn a single 2011 release into a cultural constant re-released on seemingly every device with a screen. It's less a tightly authored RPG than an ecosystem, and that's exactly why it refuses to leave the conversation.

Year: 2011Critic score: 9.4/10

added by IJRin 4 rankings

Chrono Trigger▲ Rising

Squaresoft's 1995 dream team — Sakaguchi, Horii, Toriyama — built a time-travel epic where your choices actually rippled across eras, culminating in multiple endings decades before that was standard. It's the JRPG that never overstays its welcome, tight and inventive where its contemporaries sprawled, and it's the game genre veterans still point to as the platonic ideal.

Year: 1995Critic score: 9.6/10

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Pokémon Red & Blue

Satoshi Tajiri's link-cable dream turned catching bugs into catching monsters, and the Kanto region became the shared vocabulary of an entire generation trading Charmanders and racing to beat Blue at the Elite Four. It birthed the best-selling media franchise on Earth, and every 'gotta catch 'em all' RPG since owes it rent.

Year: 1996Critic score: 9.4/10

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Final Fantasy VI▼ Falling

Kefka blowing up the world halfway through and turning the game into a post-apocalyptic scavenger hunt for your own scattered party remains one of the ballsiest structural gambles in RPG history. With Terra, Locke, Celes and Setzer given genuine emotional arcs on 16-bit hardware, it's the SNES-era peak that convinced a generation JRPGs could do literature.

Year: 1994Critic score: 9.4/10

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The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt▼ Falling

CD Projekt Red took a monster hunter with white hair and a bad attitude and built a Poland-inflected open world where a random side quest about a missing cow could end in genuine tragedy. The Bloody Baron questline alone did more character work than most games manage in total, and it set the bar every subsequent open-world RPG has been unfavorably compared to since.

Year: 2015Critic score: 9.3/10

added by IJRin 9 rankings

Pokémon Gold & Silver▼ Falling

Nobody expected a sequel to let you beat the original game's champion as an actual postgame region, but Gold & Silver crammed two full Pokémon worlds, day/night cycles, and breeding into a single cartridge and never felt bloated doing it. It's the rare sequel widely argued to have surpassed the original, which for a franchise this beloved is its own kind of legendary status.

Year: 1999Critic score: 9.3/10

added by IJRin 2 rankings