Best RPGs of All Time

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

You take an arrow to the knee, then spend 300 hours ignoring the main quest to become a blacksmith, a vampire lord, and a chicken-murderer in a small village. Its emergent, go-anywhere-do-anything design became the template for open-world RPGs for a decade, proving that a living, breathing world can be more compelling than any scripted plot. Ten years and countless re-releases later, it's still the game people point to when they mean 'RPG' to a mainstream audience.

Release Year: 2011Original Platform: PC / Xbox 360 / PS3Metascore (approx): 94 ptsMain Story Length (approx): 100 hrsCommunity Rating: 9/10

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The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

The Bloody Baron questline alone—a domestic tragedy wrapped in a monster hunt—showed the industry that side quests could carry as much emotional weight as any main story. CD Projekt Red built a world where every choice curdles into consequence, and Geralt's world-weary humanity made him gaming's best-written protagonist in years. It redefined what 'AAA open world' could mean: dense, mature, and never padded with busywork for its own sake.

Release Year: 2015Original Platform: PC / PS4 / Xbox OneMetascore (approx): 93 ptsMain Story Length (approx): 100 hrsCommunity Rating: 9.5/10

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Final Fantasy VII

Aerith's death in the Forgotten Capital became the moment an entire generation learned games could genuinely gut you emotionally, cementing JRPGs as a mainstream cultural force in the West. Midgar's steampunk dystopia and Sephiroth's operatic villainy gave PlayStation its killer app and turned Final Fantasy into a household name. Its influence is so vast that Square Enix is still unpacking it, one Remake trilogy entry at a time.

Release Year: 1997Original Platform: PlayStationMetascore (approx): 92 ptsMain Story Length (approx): 40 hrsCommunity Rating: 9/10

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Chrono Trigger

With time travel as its central mechanic, Chrono Trigger let your choices ripple across eras, giving it more genuine endings and narrative branches than almost any RPG before it. The dream team of Horii, Toriyama, and Sakaguchi produced a tight, no-filler adventure that respected players' time long before that was a design virtue anyone talked about. Nearly three decades on, it's still the gold standard for 'no wasted moments' game design.

Release Year: 1995Original Platform: Super NintendoMetascore (approx): 92 ptsMain Story Length (approx): 25 hrsCommunity Rating: 9.5/10

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Baldur's Gate 3

A game where you can seduce a vampire, turn into a bear mid-conversation, or accidentally start a war because you failed a persuasion check by one point—and the game rolls with all of it. Larian took tabletop D&D's freedom and translated it into a CRPG with more reactivity than seemed technically possible, becoming a genuine Game of the Year phenomenon and cultural moment. It reignited faith that big-budget RPGs could still be weird, dense, and player-driven rather than sanded down for mass appeal.

Release Year: 2023Original Platform: PC / PS5Metascore (approx): 96 ptsMain Story Length (approx): 75 hrsCommunity Rating: 9.5/10

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Dark Souls

The bonfire lighting up in the dark, the relief of finally beating Ornstein and Smaug after your twentieth death—Dark Souls built an entire philosophy of game design around earned triumph. Its cryptic storytelling, interconnected world, and unforgiving combat spawned an entire subgenre and forever changed how difficulty is discussed in games. 'Souls-like' entered the vocabulary because nothing before it made failure feel this meaningful.

Release Year: 2011Original Platform: PS3 / Xbox 360Metascore (approx): 89 ptsMain Story Length (approx): 45 hrsCommunity Rating: 9/10

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Persona 5

Stealing the corrupted hearts of adults via a stylish, jazz-scored dungeon crawl, Persona 5 turned the daily-life sim and dungeon-crawler hybrid into an aesthetic masterpiece nobody could stop talking about. Its UI alone is a masterclass, but it's the marriage of social simulation and demon-fusing combat that made it a genre-defining hit. It proved Atlus's slow-burn formula could finally break into mainstream, meme-generating success.

Release Year: 2016Original Platform: PlayStation 3/4Metascore (approx): 93 ptsMain Story Length (approx): 90 hrsCommunity Rating: 9/10

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Mass Effect 2

The suicide mission finale, where every crew member's survival hinges on choices you made across dozens of hours, remains one of gaming's greatest structural achievements in consequence-driven storytelling. BioWare streamlined the RPG mechanics but doubled down on character writing, turning a ragtag alien crew into some of the most beloved companions in the medium. It's the game that proved 'RPG' and 'cinematic blockbuster' weren't mutually exclusive.

Release Year: 2010Original Platform: Xbox 360 / PCMetascore (approx): 94 ptsMain Story Length (approx): 30 hrsCommunity Rating: 9/10

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Dragon Quest XI

A loving, meticulously crafted celebration of everything the genre's grandfather series ever stood for, Dragon Quest XI wraps timeless turn-based combat in gorgeous Toriyama-designed worlds and an unabashedly earnest hero's journey. It didn't reinvent anything—it didn't need to—it just executed classic JRPG structure with more polish and heart than almost anything else this decade. For newcomers wondering why Dragon Quest matters in Japan the way it does, this is the answer.

Release Year: 2017Original Platform: PS4 / PCMetascore (approx): 86 ptsMain Story Length (approx): 60 hrsCommunity Rating: 8.5/10

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Fallout: New Vegas

The Mojave Wasteland's faction politics—Legion, NCR, House, or burn it all down—gave players a moral sandbox with genuinely no correct answer, just competing visions of a broken world. Obsidian's writing, buggy launch and all, out-role-played its own publisher's game, delivering companions, quests, and endings with more nuance than the series had ever attempted. It's the RPG writers' RPG: the one game designers cite when they want to talk about real choice and consequence.

Release Year: 2010Original Platform: PC / Xbox 360 / PS3Metascore (approx): 84 ptsMain Story Length (approx): 50 hrsCommunity Rating: 9/10

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Final Fantasy X

Tidus and Yuna's doomed romance against the backdrop of Spira's cycle of sacrifice gave the series its most heartbreaking, fully-voiced story yet, and the Sphere Grid reinvented character progression as something you could sculpt rather than simply level. It was the first mainline entry to embrace full voice acting, awkward laugh scene included, pushing JRPG storytelling into a new cinematic era. Blitzball alone spawned a cult following that outlasted the console it launched on.

Release Year: 2001Original Platform: PlayStation 2Metascore (approx): 92 ptsMain Story Length (approx): 40 hrsCommunity Rating: 9/10

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Elden Ring

Dropping you into the Lands Between with zero hand-holding and a horse that can double-jump, Elden Ring took Dark Souls' brutal philosophy and exploded it into open-world scale, becoming the rare game to win Game of the Year by essentially refusing to compromise. Miyazaki and George R.R. Martin's collaboration produced lore you piece together like archaeology, and a world so dense with secrets that communities are still finding things years later. It's the moment 'Soulslike' went from niche cult genre to the biggest thing in gaming.

Release Year: 2022Original Platform: PC / PS5 / Xbox Series XMetascore (approx): 96 ptsMain Story Length (approx): 60 hrsCommunity Rating: 9.5/10

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Diablo II

The satisfying click-click-click of loot raining from a dead boss, chasing that one perfect rune drop for hundreds of hours—Diablo II basically invented the loot-driven action-RPG as we know it. Its dark fantasy atmosphere, deep itemization, and Battle.net multiplayer created the addictive gameplay loop that every looter-shooter and ARPG since has been chasing. Two decades on, its balance of randomized chaos and build-crafting depth remains shockingly hard to beat.

Release Year: 2000Original Platform: PCMetascore (approx): 88 ptsMain Story Length (approx): 20 hrsCommunity Rating: 9/10

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Planescape: Torment

'What can change the nature of a man?' isn't just a great line—it's the thesis of an RPG that cared more about philosophy, identity, and dialogue trees than combat stats, a bold inversion of genre norms in 1999. The Nameless One's quest to recover his memories produced some of the best-written companions and prose the medium has ever seen, praised endlessly by critics even as it commercially underperformed. Its DNA runs through every narrative-obsessed CRPG that followed, Baldur's Gate 3 included.

Release Year: 1999Original Platform: PCMetascore (approx): 91 ptsMain Story Length (approx): 40 hrsCommunity Rating: 9/10

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Undertale

You can beat the entire game without killing a single enemy, and the game remembers—Undertale's genocide and pacifist routes turned player morality into the actual mechanical core rather than a dialogue-wheel afterthought. Toby Fox's one-man passion project subverted JRPG combat tropes with humor, heartbreak, and a killer soundtrack that became instantly iconic. It proved an indie RPG with SNES-era graphics could out-write and out-emote games with hundred-times the budget.

Release Year: 2015Original Platform: PCMetascore (approx): 92 ptsMain Story Length (approx): 8 hrsCommunity Rating: 9/10

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Divinity: Original Sin 2

Setting an oil slick on fire to electrocute a lake full of enemies, or turning a companion into a chicken mid-fight—Original Sin 2's elemental, physics-driven combat made tactical RPGs feel like sandboxes of chaos. Larian's reactive dialogue and multiplayer co-op storytelling laid the direct groundwork for Baldur's Gate 3's success. It's the game that proved isometric CRPGs still had massive, untapped commercial potential.

Release Year: 2017Original Platform: PCMetascore (approx): 93 ptsMain Story Length (approx): 70 hrsCommunity Rating: 9/10

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EarthBound

A kid armed with a baseball bat and psychic powers fighting sentient piles of vomit and corporate cults in suburban America—EarthBound's off-kilter humor and heart made it a cult classic that critics didn't fully appreciate until years later. Its willingness to subvert fantasy-RPG tropes with mundane, contemporary settings influenced everyone from Undertale to Mother fanatics worldwide. Rarely has an RPG been this weird, this sincere, and this quietly devastating in its final moments.

Release Year: 1994Original Platform: Super NintendoMetascore (approx): 89 ptsMain Story Length (approx): 20 hrsCommunity Rating: 8.5/10

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Final Fantasy VI

The moment the world literally breaks in half between Acts, and Celes contemplates suicide on a cliffside, marked one of the darkest, most ambitious turns 16-bit gaming ever attempted. With a sprawling ensemble cast each getting genuine arcs and an opera house sequence that still gets covered by orchestras today, it's often cited as the peak of the pixel-era Final Fantasy formula. Decades of 'best Final Fantasy' debates still circle back to this one as the sentimental favorite.

Release Year: 1994Original Platform: Super NintendoMetascore (approx): 93 ptsMain Story Length (approx): 35 hrsCommunity Rating: 9.5/10

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Persona 4 Golden

Solving murders in a sleepy Japanese town by diving into a TV world that manifests your friends' hidden shadow selves, Persona 4 built a mystery-and-friendship structure so compelling it turned the Social Link system into the genre standard. The Golden re-release polished every edge of an already beloved game, adding new content that made it the definitive version and a gateway drug for a generation of Persona fans. Its cast, the beach episode, the laughter—it's the JRPG people describe as 'like hanging out with your best friends.'

Release Year: 2012Original Platform: PS VitaMetascore (approx): 93 ptsMain Story Length (approx): 70 hrsCommunity Rating: 9/10

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Xenoblade Chronicles

Fighting on the frozen backs of two colossal gods locked in eternal battle, Xenoblade turned its entire world into one of the most audacious settings in RPG history, then backed it up with a real-time combat system built on positioning and party synergy. Monolith Soft delivered a JRPG epic on the underpowered Wii that critics said shouldn't have been technically possible, with a scope and ambition that rivaled anything on more powerful hardware. It became a cult phenomenon precisely because it dared to think bigger than its platform allowed.

Release Year: 2010Original Platform: WiiMetascore (approx): 83 ptsMain Story Length (approx): 70 hrsCommunity Rating: 8.5/10

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