What does it mean to be a hero? To qualify, a series needs to hail from a Japan-based developer (with the realization that a bit of input from international studios is unavoidable in some of the bigger contemporary franchises). You can even punch deadly meatwall bosses to death in a “naked” challenge. The World Ends With You is a Nintendo DS game that combined JRPG elements with those of the rhythm and action RPG genres. Released as the second game in the Paper Mario series, The Thousand-Year door came out to general critical praise on the GameCube in 2004, though it was not appreciated much for the lack of evolution between it and the earlier Nintendo 64 title. The gameplay plays out in real-time with the ability to pause while issuing orders, the amount of which is limited by the number of action points each character has. Players control four young children, known as the Chosen Four, as they battle against the evil alien Giygas in the present before he becomes too powerful in the future. In time, things changed. Players experience a dark and gritty storyline that’s much more mature than other titles in the Final Fantasy series, with a setting and presentation inspired by war documentaries. ), but Castlevania’s free-roaming adventures have delivered the goods more, and more consistently, than any other series to date. This time around, players can choose from two distinct stories (set on different cartridges) that tell entirely different stories with the same character, subtitled Birthright and Conquest, respectively. Here’s some of the best JRPGs of all times, or maybe even, some of the best video games of all times period. But with better visuals came changes in art style. Not just a subgenre of roleplaying games, but a proper genre in itself, it was one of few gaming categories that were specifically named after the place of origin. The downside? Another special element to the title is your ability of building up a castle, recruiting more characters to it, each of which brings something new, like a new conversation piece, a new shop or even new minigames, like Iron Chef-style cook-offs, or fishing. Beyond its gameplay and technical elements, Final Fantasy X was notable for its story, which centered around a character named Tidus, a blitzball player who finds himself in the fantasy world of Spira after his home is destroyed by an entity named Sin. The Final Fantasy series started to feature more and more realistic characters (wearing increasingly silly costumes) for one. In all of Final Fantasy’s long running history, arguably none of its entries have garnered the same level of adoration as Final Fantasy VII. The plot spans a Japanese high school year, where the player spends his time, going to school, forming social contacts, and then battling demons inside a television reality at night. That’s been the guiding theme of Mario’s RPG forays ever since. Described as something of a love letter to the Final Fantasy series, this PS4 and PS Vita title stars two protagonists, a brother and sister, who travel through the worlds of the entire Final Fantasy series of games, where they will battle against staple creatures from the series and meet up and befriend famous Final Fantasy characters including Lightning and Cloud Strife. Persona 4 features all the trademark elements of the Persona series, though taking the story from the big city to the countryside. The ultimate question at work here is simple: Which series best embody the strengths (and the weaknesses!) It retains the style and feel of the previous Persona games but comes with the new theme of restraint and liberation this time around. The Japanese Role Playing Game has always been a strange phenomenon. At this point, Tales has settled into a sort of complacent familiarity — ironically meaning this series, which once stood as a bold contrast to its competitors, has become equally workmanlike in nature. A generic role-playing game for Sega CD became a cult favorite in the U.S. thanks to Working Designs’ groundbreakingly sarcastic English-language script and excellent voice acting in the era of cable-access-quality full-motion video. Finally, in order to qualify as a role-playing series, the majority of its games need to incorporate some sort of level- or experienced-based statistic and attribute mechanics — sorry, Zelda! A very complex game with a lot of content and story to it, Suikoden II employs a turn based combat style in which your (up to 6) characters can attack simultaneously, while also having a strategic combat element separate to it, in which you can pit armies against each-other. The Kingdom Hearts games got off to a strong start, marrying a bonkers premise (Final Fantasy meets classic Disney!?) In other words, the boundaries of this list are by nature somewhat nebulous and hard to pin down … just like the genre itself. However, its follow-ups tend to be more of an acquired taste. Kazuma Kiryu and his partners in noble crime wander the streets, engaging in random combat in order to gain both experience and cash, dabbling in side quests while they pursue the main story — it’s pure RPG, through and through. Tales of Vesperia is the tenth title in the long-running Tales series of games from Namco Bandai’s Tales Studio. There’s a reason “making games like Chrono Trigger” remains a compelling (not to mention elusive) goal for many RPG developers even today. You simply have to apply yourself. The game plays in the style of a classic JRPG. More than ten million copies have been sold since its release in 1997 for the original PlayStation, spawning several spin-offs and even a movie while strong calls for a remake continue to ring. When Nintendo presented the prospect of dedicating a second screen entirely to maps as a possible use case for the DS handheld, veteran Atlus RPG designers saw it as a golden opportunity to bring back a forgotten video game discipline: Mapping out complex dungeons by hand on graph paper. Dark Souls is fear in the form of a videogame. With luck, the upcoming Kingdom Hearts 3 will hopefully allow this franchise to hop out of the rut it’s fallen into. But what makes a truly great JRPG? Sure, the series’ vision of Tokyo take a lot of liberties with the truth, but its fanciful vision of modern Japan (and historic Japan, in the case of a few spinoffs) feels perfectly appropriate for a series that inflates the popular image of Japan’s take on the mafia into high-minded Robin Hood-like crusaders for the greater good. Whereas the ATB concept features real-time elements, the CTB system is a turn-based format that pauses the battle during each of the player’s turns. Released in 2006 for the Game Boy Advance, it unfortunately never saw a release outside of Japan. For nearly 30 years, the SaGa games have translated the idiomatic tastes of Final Fantasy co-creator Akitoshi Kawazu into a string of unforgiving, unapologetic role-playing enigmas. Beginning with Super Mario RPG for Super NES and encompassing the Paper Mario and Mario & Luigi games (and even several Mario sports titles if you want to be generous), Mario’s flirtations with role-playing rules really have only one thing in common: You gotta know about timed hits, bro. Put together, they are a potent combination. Back to the days when video games weren’t afraid to be brutally difficult. Many elements of Japanese youth culture, such as fashion, food, and cell phones are key aspects of the characters, the world, and the missions which take place in the game. However, a fan translation has since been released. New to the Thousand-Year Door, your party members are actually tangible and can be defeated, though only in the sole case of Mario being incapacitated will your game actually end. Over time, the rules of the SaGa universe have become somewhat clear, but the games make no effort to be scrutable or to lay their workings bare for newcomers. Unfortunately, the series has been stuck in a holding pattern for more than a decade. Players can take direct control of their soldiers to target and take down enemies. There was an overworld, a party of characters with different, complementary abilities that leveled up in a rather linear progression, towns and villages to be visited with characters who all knew one line of dialog, dungeons to be raided, combat that was based on “random encounters”, and a battle screen that was completely separate from the rest of the game. Back then, it helped to define the strategy genre alongside Nintendo’s Fire Emblem, livening up what amounts to virtual chess with its colorful characters and flashy battle animations. Those finally came to fruition with the arrival of 1997’s Symphony of the Night, which included everything you really need to qualify as an RPG: a complex inventory system, a driving storyline and a character-building experience system. And what a masterpiece of a game! 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